Constant Cleansing

1 John 1:7

When we come out of the darkness of sin and walk in the glorious light of Jesus’ truth, we not only fellowship with other believers, but we have a constant flow of the blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse us from all of our sin. His blood is a permanent fixture in the life of the redeemed, ever flowing to cover all of our failures and sins. This flow turns the scarlet sins, “white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18).

Jesus stood on the final day of the Feast of Tabernacles and cried out for all to hear, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:37, 38). He timed this announcement to coincide with the High Priest pouring the water from the pool of Siloam over the altar in the temple. Every Jew that was gathered that day would not have missed the point of Christ, “I am the High Priest. Follow me and you will never need another”.

This is the same theme that Jesus delivered to the woman at the well in the Samaritan village of Sychar. She came to the well at the hottest part of the day, while all other women came at sunrise. She obviously had grown weary of hearing the whispers about her 5 previous husbands and her live-in lover, so she came to the well to draw water, alone. Jesus met here there, being led of the Spirit for this one woman, and told her that she would thirst again if she relied only on physical water, but if she turned to Him, He would give her, “a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14).

Jesus ever lives to make intercession for the believer (Hebrews 7:25), so His work, though finished at the cross, is ever ongoing in application. When we accept Christ as the payment for our sins, we receive the Holy Spirit as the evidence or “down-payment” of our inheritance (2 Corinthians 1:22). The Comforter then goes to work in the believer, constantly reminding them of their place in Christ, with the blood of Jesus always washing over them to keep them pure.

Without the constant cleansing of the Spirit, you and I would be guilty nearly every moment of the day. This guilt would not be from breaking the 10 Commandments or some other moral law of God, but from the dietary and sanitary laws of God. Everything from sexual emissions to a woman’s time of the month would make Israelites unclean. These were things that they could do nothing about, but that did not lessen their guilt. They were always washing and re-washing in an attempt to stay clean.

Christ pours His blood over us every moment of every day so that we always remain non-offensive to God. Though we fail, the ever present blood of Jesus makes us appear in God’s eyes just as Jesus appears.

Some find fault with these statements, saying that Jesus can’t possibly cleanse us from future sins, because we have not confessed them yet. Confession is for the unbeliever, and Paul never tells the believer to confess in order to receive forgiveness. We do confess so that our loving Father can embrace us, but not so that we can receive of His goodness. If Jesus cannot forgive future sins, then none of your sins are gone, for He died 2,000 years before you committed them!

Rejoice in the knowledge that the blood of Jesus Christ is constantly cleansing you and you are as clean as Jesus in the eyes of the Father.

(For more information on this topic, contact the ministry and ask for Pastor Paul’s sermon titled, “Constant Cleansing”. We will send to you as our gift. Thank you.)

A Clean Conscience

Hebrews 9:14

Many of us use the phrase “my conscience is clean” when we know that we have done nothing wrong in a certain situation. However, when we know that we have done wrong, our conscience haunts us and condemns our actions. This causes us to try and work our way back into favor with those that we have wronged; even if that one is God. These works are genuine efforts on our part to make amends for our failures, and they often make us feel better about the issue.

The author of Hebrews pointed out that the blood of Christ obtains eternal redemption for all of us who accept Jesus (Hebrews 9:12). Having paid for our salvation, the blood goes on to do much more than just guarantee us that we are pure; it actually purges our conscience from the need to perform “dead works” (Hebrews 9:14). This means that as we realize just how forgiven and accepted that we are because of the blood of Jesus; we do not try to appease our conscience with works that can change nothing.

Acknowledging the finished work of Jesus will show us that no work on our part could ever even match, much less supersede what great price that He has paid for us on the cross. If a believer has little or no recognition of the finished work, they will live by their conscience, always trying to pay God back for their sins and failures. Satan will exploit this dependency on conscience by heaping on guilt and condemnation, even going so far as to tell the believer that they are not reading enough scripture, or praying enough, or giving enough. Some seemed shocked to think that Satan would actually encourage believers to do these seemingly “good” things, but do not be surprised; Satan wants your focus off of the finished work and onto your own!

Every time that you concentrate on your sin or your failure, you inflame consciousness of sin. Some preach that if the believer is not sin-conscious then they will ignore sin and go deeper into it. The Word teaches the opposite:

“For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? Because that the worshippers once purged should have no more conscience of sins” (Hebrews 10:1, 2).

If the sacrificial system of the law had made the individual offering them perfect, wouldn’t they have ceased to offer the sacrifices? Of course they would have, but the sacrifices did nothing to change man’s heart, thus he was always guilty. Once they were cleansed they should have no more guilt on their conscience, but we know that they did because the next verse makes that clear:

“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year” (Hebrews 10:3).

Every time that they brought a lamb they became “sin-conscious”, and every time that they became sin-conscious, their conscience condemned them. Let us become “Savior-conscious” and watch Him purge us of our sin. Then we will have no more reason to be guilty in our conscience and we can live free in His righteousness and true holiness.

The Searching of the Heart

Jeremiah 17:9, 10

Charles Spurgeon once said, “The heart is deceitful; more than the devil”. Unsaved man can never live by what he says his heart wants, for it is full of lust and lies. Filmmaker Woody Allen married his ex-wife’s adopted daughter, whom he had helped raise since she was a little girl. When a reporter confronted him about the relationship, he replied “The heart wants what it wants”, and therein lies the problem.

The heart of man has been tainted since the sin of Adam in the Garden. We are incapable of making moral decisions that line up with God’s morality, since we are “desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9). God promised that He was the searcher of man’s heart and that He would judge man according to who he was on the inside. This dooms man to judgment.

There is good news to go along with this dreadful news, thank God! Jesus came and lived the demands of God’s holiness to perfection and then sacrificed His life for you and I. God has taken His wrath out on Jesus so that we can accept salvation by faith through the finished work of the cross. When we do this, we are clothed in robes of righteousness and set free from sin. Look at the New Testament’s assessment of the believer who has accepted Christ by faith:

“And ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power” (Colossians 2:10).

“For by one offering He hath perfected forever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).

You are the completed one in Colossians and you are the perfected one in Hebrews, if you have accepted Christ by faith. This is the best news of all good news for it means that God has accepted you independent of your ability to earn it or to keep it. Now you have a clean heart which can hear from the Father with no fear of wickedness or evil tainting your decision. Paul said, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Unregenerate man cannot know the things of God because their hearts are wicked, but look at the next verse: “But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God” (2:10).

God is obviously still in the searching business, even after we are saved. However, now that we are His children, His searching is for different purposes. He cannot be looking for more sin, for Jesus has paid for all of our sins in His blood at the cross. On the contrary, the Spirit is searching the deep things of God to reveal them to us. Paul said of the Holy Spirit, “And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27). Again, the Spirit is searching the heart of the saint, but not to find sin. Instead, He is finding the will of God in each of our lives.

Your heart is clean if you have accepted Jesus by faith. If you have not, your heart remains locked within sin and transgression, and you will stand alone at the judgment, defended only by your ability or inability to keep God’s laws. Won’t you accept Him who cleans the heart and sheds His love into it? He loves you friend, more than you will ever know!

Constant Cleansing

1 John 1:7

When we come out of the darkness of sin and walk in the glorious light of Jesus’ truth, we not only fellowship with other believers, but we have a constant flow of the blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse us from all of our sin. His blood is a permanent fixture in the life of the redeemed, ever flowing to cover all of our failures and sins. This flow turns the scarlet sins, “white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18).

Jesus stood on the final day of the Feast of Tabernacles and cried out for all to hear, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:37, 38). He timed this announcement to coincide with the High Priest pouring the water from the pool of Siloam over the altar in the temple. Every Jew that was gathered that day would not have missed the point of Christ, “I am the High Priest. Follow me and you will never need another”.

This is the same theme that Jesus delivered to the woman at the well in the Samaritan village of Sychar. She came to the well at the hottest part of the day, while all other women came at sunrise. She obviously had grown weary of hearing the whispers about her 5 previous husbands and her live-in lover, so she came to the well to draw water, alone. Jesus met here there, being led of the Spirit for this one woman, and told her that she would thirst again if she relied only on physical water, but if she turned to Him, He would give her, “a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14).

Jesus ever lives to make intercession for the believer (Hebrews 7:25), so His work, though finished at the cross, is ever ongoing in application. When we accept Christ as the payment for our sins, we receive the Holy Spirit as the evidence or “down-payment” of our inheritance (2 Corinthians 1:22). The Comforter then goes to work in the believer, constantly reminding them of their place in Christ, with the blood of Jesus always washing over them to keep them pure.

Without the constant cleansing of the Spirit, you and I would be guilty nearly every moment of the day. This guilt would not be from breaking the 10 Commandments or some other moral law of God, but from the dietary and sanitary laws of God. Everything from sexual emissions to a woman’s time of the month would make Israelites unclean. These were things that they could do nothing about, but that did not lessen their guilt. They were always washing and re-washing in an attempt to stay clean.

Christ pours His blood over us every moment of every day so that we always remain non-offensive to God. Though we fail, the ever present blood of Jesus makes us appear in God’s eyes just as Jesus appears.

Some find fault with these statements, saying that Jesus can’t possibly cleanse us from future sins, because we have not confessed them yet. Confession is for the unbeliever, and Paul never tells the believer to confess in order to receive forgiveness. We do confess so that our loving Father can embrace us, but not so that we can receive of His goodness. If Jesus cannot forgive future sins, then none of your sins are gone, for He died 2,000 years before you committed them!

Rejoice in the knowledge that the blood of Jesus Christ is constantly cleansing you and you are as clean as Jesus in the eyes of the Father.

(For more information on this topic, contact the ministry and ask for Pastor Paul’s sermon titled, “Constant Cleansing”. We will send to you as our gift. Thank you.)

A Clean Conscience

Hebrews 9:14

Many of us use the phrase “my conscience is clean” when we know that we have done nothing wrong in a certain situation. However, when we know that we have done wrong, our conscience haunts us and condemns our actions. This causes us to try and work our way back into favor with those that we have wronged; even if that one is God. These works are genuine efforts on our part to make amends for our failures, and they often make us feel better about the issue.

The author of Hebrews pointed out that the blood of Christ obtains eternal redemption for all of us who accept Jesus (Hebrews 9:12). Having paid for our salvation, the blood goes on to do much more than just guarantee us that we are pure; it actually purges our conscience from the need to perform “dead works” (Hebrews 9:14). This means that as we realize just how forgiven and accepted that we are because of the blood of Jesus; we do not try to appease our conscience with works that can change nothing.

Acknowledging the finished work of Jesus will show us that no work on our part could ever even match, much less supersede what great price that He has paid for us on the cross. If a believer has little or no recognition of the finished work, they will live by their conscience, always trying to pay God back for their sins and failures. Satan will exploit this dependency on conscience by heaping on guilt and condemnation, even going so far as to tell the believer that they are not reading enough scripture, or praying enough, or giving enough. Some seemed shocked to think that Satan would actually encourage believers to do these seemingly “good” things, but do not be surprised; Satan wants your focus off of the finished work and onto your own!

Every time that you concentrate on your sin or your failure, you inflame consciousness of sin. Some preach that if the believer is not sin-conscious then they will ignore sin and go deeper into it. The Word teaches the opposite:

“For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? Because that the worshippers once purged should have no more conscience of sins” (Hebrews 10:1, 2).

If the sacrificial system of the law had made the individual offering them perfect, wouldn’t they have ceased to offer the sacrifices? Of course they would have, but the sacrifices did nothing to change man’s heart, thus he was always guilty. Once they were cleansed they should have no more guilt on their conscience, but we know that they did because the next verse makes that clear:

“But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year” (Hebrews 10:3).

Every time that they brought a lamb they became “sin-conscious”, and every time that they became sin-conscious, their conscience condemned them. Let us become “Savior-conscious” and watch Him purge us of our sin. Then we will have no more reason to be guilty in our conscience and we can live free in His righteousness and true holiness.

The Searching of the Heart

Jeremiah 17:9, 10

Charles Spurgeon once said, “The heart is deceitful; more than the devil”. Unsaved man can never live by what he says his heart wants, for it is full of lust and lies. Filmmaker Woody Allen married his ex-wife’s adopted daughter, whom he had helped raise since she was a little girl. When a reporter confronted him about the relationship, he replied “The heart wants what it wants”, and therein lies the problem.

The heart of man has been tainted since the sin of Adam in the Garden. We are incapable of making moral decisions that line up with God’s morality, since we are “desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9). God promised that He was the searcher of man’s heart and that He would judge man according to who he was on the inside. This dooms man to judgment.

There is good news to go along with this dreadful news, thank God! Jesus came and lived the demands of God’s holiness to perfection and then sacrificed His life for you and I. God has taken His wrath out on Jesus so that we can accept salvation by faith through the finished work of the cross. When we do this, we are clothed in robes of righteousness and set free from sin. Look at the New Testament’s assessment of the believer who has accepted Christ by faith:

“And ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power” (Colossians 2:10).

“For by one offering He hath perfected forever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).

You are the completed one in Colossians and you are the perfected one in Hebrews, if you have accepted Christ by faith. This is the best news of all good news for it means that God has accepted you independent of your ability to earn it or to keep it. Now you have a clean heart which can hear from the Father with no fear of wickedness or evil tainting your decision. Paul said, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Unregenerate man cannot know the things of God because their hearts are wicked, but look at the next verse: “But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God” (2:10).

God is obviously still in the searching business, even after we are saved. However, now that we are His children, His searching is for different purposes. He cannot be looking for more sin, for Jesus has paid for all of our sins in His blood at the cross. On the contrary, the Spirit is searching the deep things of God to reveal them to us. Paul said of the Holy Spirit, “And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:27). Again, the Spirit is searching the heart of the saint, but not to find sin. Instead, He is finding the will of God in each of our lives.

Your heart is clean if you have accepted Jesus by faith. If you have not, your heart remains locked within sin and transgression, and you will stand alone at the judgment, defended only by your ability or inability to keep God’s laws. Won’t you accept Him who cleans the heart and sheds His love into it? He loves you friend, more than you will ever know!

Constant Cleansing

1 John 1:7

When we come out of the darkness of sin and walk in the glorious light of Jesus’ truth, we not only fellowship with other believers, but we have a constant flow of the blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse us from all of our sin. His blood is a permanent fixture in the life of the redeemed, ever flowing to cover all of our failures and sins. This flow turns the scarlet sins, “white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18).

Jesus stood on the final day of the Feast of Tabernacles and cried out for all to hear, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:37, 38). He timed this announcement to coincide with the High Priest pouring the water from the pool of Siloam over the altar in the temple. Every Jew that was gathered that day would not have missed the point of Christ, “I am the High Priest. Follow me and you will never need another”.

This is the same theme that Jesus delivered to the woman at the well in the Samaritan village of Sychar. She came to the well at the hottest part of the day, while all other women came at sunrise. She obviously had grown weary of hearing the whispers about her 5 previous husbands and her live-in lover, so she came to the well to draw water, alone. Jesus met here there, being led of the Spirit for this one woman, and told her that she would thirst again if she relied only on physical water, but if she turned to Him, He would give her, “a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14).

Jesus ever lives to make intercession for the believer (Hebrews 7:25), so His work, though finished at the cross, is ever ongoing in application. When we accept Christ as the payment for our sins, we receive the Holy Spirit as the evidence or “down-payment” of our inheritance (2 Corinthians 1:22). The Comforter then goes to work in the believer, constantly reminding them of their place in Christ, with the blood of Jesus always washing over them to keep them pure.

Without the constant cleansing of the Spirit, you and I would be guilty nearly every moment of the day. This guilt would not be from breaking the 10 Commandments or some other moral law of God, but from the dietary and sanitary laws of God. Everything from sexual emissions to a woman’s time of the month would make Israelites unclean. These were things that they could do nothing about, but that did not lessen their guilt. They were always washing and re-washing in an attempt to stay clean.

Christ pours His blood over us every moment of every day so that we always remain non-offensive to God. Though we fail, the ever present blood of Jesus makes us appear in God’s eyes just as Jesus appears.

Some find fault with these statements, saying that Jesus can’t possibly cleanse us from future sins, because we have not confessed them yet. Confession is for the unbeliever, and Paul never tells the believer to confess in order to receive forgiveness. We do confess so that our loving Father can embrace us, but not so that we can receive of His goodness. If Jesus cannot forgive future sins, then none of your sins are gone, for He died 2,000 years before you committed them!

Rejoice in the knowledge that the blood of Jesus Christ is constantly cleansing you and you are as clean as Jesus in the eyes of the Father.

(For more information on this topic, contact the ministry and ask for Pastor Paul’s sermon titled, “Constant Cleansing”. We will send to you as our gift. Thank you.)