SA Ep97 - Nearer to Thee - Wash Thyself

SA Ep97 - Nearer to Thee - Wash Thyself

In this episode, we begin the series Drawing Nearer to Thee by looking at the first step in drawing closer to Christ: being freshly cleansed. From Ruth 3:3, Naomi told Ruth, “Wash thyself therefore,” before she went to the feet of Boaz, her kinsman redeemer. That simple instruction gives us a powerful picture of the believer’s need for cleansing before enjoying close fellowship with the Lord. We will look at the danger of holding on to sin, the cleansing power of the Word of God, the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ, and the honest confession needed for a believer to walk near the Lord again.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Seeking Approval Podcast. I'm Dr. Chris Smelser from Iliad Baptist Church. You know life moves fast, and faith is not meant to be rushed. I want to take some time and slow down with you and have some honest conversations from the Word of God about daily living. So join me here today on Seeking Approval. Let's be honest. You can't walk close to a holy God while trying to hold tightly to the sin that keeps our hearts and lives dirty with sin. The promise is clear. Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you. The same verse invites us to draw nigh to God is a verse that implies that we need to be freshly clean, to cleanse ourselves and rid ourselves of the sin of the world. Well, but preacher, I'm not supposed to clean myself up to come to God, doesn't he take care of that? Well, I would say that there's probably a little bit of work that goes on both sides, probably a whole lot more work on his side than our side. But there is a responsibility on our side. I don't think that we can just walk to God with all the sin of this world still in our hands and holding on to it and saying, well, you know, God, I'll serve you, but I want to keep this stuff. No, I think there's some there's some cleaning up on our side that we need to do as well. So as we do, look at this very first episode of drawing nearer to thee. We're beginning with I guess a truth that every Christian, not, and I'm not talking about it's one of the most overused words in the I think in the modern world, that and the word offended are probably two of the most overused words. I'm talking to the real Christians, the real, the serious Christians who know Jesus Christ as their Savior, who understand the death, burial, and the resurrection, as Paul says, because if you don't understand that, if you don't believe that, then you're not a Christian. If you've never repented of your sins, if you've never laid down our selfish will and desire and picked up God's will, as Christ did in the Garden of Gethsemane, a picture of salvation, how we how we are to understand salvation is that it's not our will, but his will that should be done in our life. So I'm talking to those. And for those Christians, nearness to God is not something that's casual. Fellowship with the Lord is not something we just stumble onto while living carelessly and cold and distracted lives mingled with sin and the distresses of this world. Nearer to God, nearer to Christ, is a real invitation from a God who wants to be in fellowship with you. But there's a real preparation that it takes for us. One of the sweetest promises in the Bible is that if you draw nigh to God, he'll draw nigh to you. He's not going to push you away. He's not going to do the old little kid thing that we do where we put our hand on their forehead and push them backwards and as they're trying to swing and hit you, and they're just flailing their arms about, and the whole time he's holding you, you know. That's not what he that's not what this is. He says, You draw me, and I'm coming to you. I'm there. But the verse doesn't stop there. It goes on to say, Cleanse your hands, ye sinners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. A lot of people won't go on and read that next verse. They just want the sweet promise of drawing to God, and he'll draw nigh to you. God, I'm going to carry all my alcohol and my drugs and all my uh riotous living, I'm going to carry all my filthy language, and I'm just going to come to you and bring all that with me. God, you just accept me how I am. That's what we're hearing out of a lot of our pulpits today. God will accept you exactly how you are. That's not what James wrote. And James wrote it in a way that most preachers will never say it out of the pulpit today. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners. Purify your hearts, ye double-minded. That sounds like there's some work on our side that we need to do. The picture for this series comes from the book of Ruth. Now, Ruth is one of the most beautiful books in the Old Testament. I mean, it's at least one of the top 66 most beautiful books in all of Scripture. You'll get that in a minute. On the surface, it's a tender story of loss and loyalty and providence, love, redemption. But underneath the surface, there's a greater story, and you know, still even more than that. You can continue digging as you can with most scripture and accounts in all the Bible. Ruth, who was a Moabitus widow, gives us a picture of one brought in by grace. She had no claim, no standing, no wealth, and no power on her own. Yet grace brought her into the field of Boaz. Boaz was a mighty man of wealth. That gives us the picture of us and Jesus Christ. We had no claim, we had no standing, no wealth, no power. We can't come to him on our own. He is the kinsman redeemer, he's a mighty man of wealth and power. He had the right to redeem or to reject. He had the riches to redeem or to reject. And he had the willingness that he could have redeemed or rejected. But he chose to make us right. He chose to give us the riches and wealth. And he chose, and I'm not talking about, you know, money in your pocket, I'm talking about the riches of heaven, which are more than money. Money is nothing in heaven. And he chose to the willingness to redeem us. And in Ruth that whole journey in at the feet of Boaz in Ruth Dree uh chapter three gives us that spiritual pattern. Now we told Ruth in chapter three, verse three, listen to what she said, wash thyself, therefore, and anoint thee, and put thy raiment upon thee and get thee down to the floor. Before Ruth ever went to Boaz. She was told to wash herself. That's not just a random detail of, you know, just you know, make sure you're cleaned up. It was preparation. She was not to go into this carelessly. She was not to go into it thoughtlessly. She was not going in with the old marks of widowhood and sorrow and sin upon her life. She was preparing herself to come before the king and redeemer. And that's what that's the first truth of if we want to live closer to Christ, we must be freshly cleansed. That doesn't mean saved again. That doesn't mean baptized again. That means that we need to do some cleaning up on our own if we want to walk. Remember, I'm talking to the believer. This is not salvation. We are not earning salvation by cleaning ourselves. This is walking closer to Christ. The sinner is made clean because of what Christ does, because of the salvation, because of the redeeming. But our walk with Christ can become marred in the sin that we can continue to hang on to. And that's why this being freshly cleansed matters, because a dirty heart, a dirty mind, a dirty life, filthy actions can't enjoy the closeness with God because God can't be near it. I understand that God, when he sees us, he sees the blood of Christ. When he sees us, he sees the righteousness of Christ. But as Paul said, we're not to worship him because of what he's going to do. We should worship him. We should walk closer to him. We should lay the things of this world aside because of what he's already done for us as Christians. As Christians. Most you know, even still probably go to church. But we've forgotten that we can't hang on to the things of the world. And when we do, our prayer closet becomes cold and full of cobwebs. The Bible is no longer alive. Church is more of a routine, conviction is pushed away to the side, the heart becomes cold, joy is it seems to be no longer present. It's a problem. Sin and neglect have a dividing uh reaction on our affection to Christ. Causes the heart to distance. David knew this after his sin with Bathsheba. He he didn't lose his position with God as God's chosen man, but he lost the joy and the freshness of the fellowship. He wrote in Psalm 51, too, when uh regarding all those things that happened, he says, Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, cleanse me of my sin, purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Create in me a clean heart, O God, renew a right spirit in me. Listen to all the words of cleansing that he uses. Wash me, cleanse me, purge me, clean me, wash me, create a clean heart, renew a right spirit. All those are words of cleansing and newness. David didn't offer excuses. He didn't blame Bathsheba. He didn't blame his loneliness. My my spouse doesn't really seem to give me much attention anymore, so therefore I'm I'm gonna make things right on my own. It's not it never he didn't say any of that. He said, God, this is on me. This I am cold, I am di I am indifferent. Clean me, wash me, purge me. But too often we want to point the finger at somebody else for our shortcomings and our our loss of attraction to what God has for us. There's a lot more that I would love to cover in this episode. So much that we could say about the cleansing. One of the great agents of cleansing is the blood of Jesus Christ. 1 John 1 7 says the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin. Might be one of the greatest statements in all the Bible. We must confess. If we want to clean ourselves, if we want a closer walk with God, we've got to confess. We've got to get rid of some of these things and quit trying to quit trying to find reasons why our sin is okay. We're trying to explain away our compromise by pointing the finger at other things and people and situations. Just start taking ownership. I mean one of the sayings used to be name it, nail it, and confess it. What does that mean? Name it? Name what the sin is, nail it to the cross and confess it. Name it for what it is. So many of our churches today won't preach against sin because uh become afraid it might hurt people's feelings. Well, if I preach on alcohol, it may hurt some people's feelings. If I preach against drugs, it might hurt some people's feelings. If I preach against uh fornication or or uh uh if I preach against um uh having a lustful eye for uh someone who's not our spouse, I can't do those things. If I preach against telling dirty jokes, everybody tells dirty jokes. Everybody uses foul language from time to time. It's just, you know, it's just part of life. That's what it is. No, I can tell you what it is, it's sin. It's anything that's not becoming of God. It's anything that we do that we know we shouldn't do, we're not doing the things we should do. Sin of omission, sin of commission. Sins against God, sins against heaven, sins against the Holy Ghost, sins against the Son. I mean, on and on and on. And people have been trying to hide this sin, and preachers won't uh discuss it. David, the one we just talked about, he tried to cover his sin and it ate him up. Got a man killed over it, or he killed a man over it. Achan tried to hide the sin in his tent, brought trouble to the whole camp. And I and Sapphire tried to hide sin. They tried to look religious in appearance, judgment fell on them. We need to confess our sin. We need to nail it to the cross. Call it exactly what it is. Because I can promise you, sin will eventually be exposed. And a lot of times, you know, we think whenever our sin gets exposed, we'll say, Oh, that was that was God. He was he was exposing my sin, so I will see it. I don't think God is in the business of embarrassing people. Will he expose sin? I absolutely. I mean, there's plenty of evidence of that in scripture. But I think sometimes Satan is the one who ends up revealing our sin for us. Because he he wants just to go ahead and separate you even farther from the the the other people of the church or or the family or where you once found uh uh the nearness of Christ, and if he can sever that tie and push you farther away, man, he'll expose that in a heartbeat. He'll bring everything up everything. Oh, I remember when they uh said this and did that and watched that and looked at this and talked about that, and it'll it'll start coming out, and people will just push you farther and farther away before you know it, you have nowhere to turn, so you just stay in your sin and the devil's got you. And the whole time he's just sinking those hooks in deeper and deeper and deeper. Bible says if we say we have no sin, we're deceiving ourselves, and the truth's not in us. David went on to say, Search me, O God, know my heart. Try me, know my thoughts. If there's something in there, God, pull it out. I don't care if you got to do it surgically or if you gotta just get in and hook it up and rip it out. Get it out of me, God. He went on to say in 139-24 of Psalm, and see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. Lead me away from that, God, cleanse me. So the first thing we must do, I've got so much more, the first thing that we must do, if we want to live a life that is nearer to Christ, we need to get some of those things. Let me let me rephrase that. That was a little too soft. We need to get all of those things out of our life. Wash ourselves. The first words that Naomi told Ruth, wash thyself. If we want to draw nearer to God, we need to wash ourselves. And he says, if you draw nigh to me, I will draw nigh to you. We need to continue to draw nearer to him. Thank you for joining us today on Seeking Approval. You know our faith oftentimes grows in quiet places. I hope today's conversation gave you something worth carrying throughout the rest of this day. And join me, Dr. Chris Smelser, again next time as we continue thinking, learning, and walking together. Until then, grace and peace to you from Seeking Approval at Gilead Baptist Church.