Holiness | Priscilla Shirer

Old school holiness, y’all.
You’re gonna have to make a decision to live right to choose to live holy because you can be in your war room praying until you’re blue in the face.
But if you come out of that prayer closet and you live in a raggedy wayward lifestyle that is out of alignment with the truth of God, then your prayers will have been wasted.
You gotta be holy. If I were your enemy more than anything else, I would want you going into battle without a breastplate because if a roman soldier had brawn and had muscle, if a roman soldier had previous victory, So he had great experience in battle.
If the roman soldier had great knowledge and knew the formations for the battle array, but he went into battle with all of that stuff, but without a breastplate, one shot to the heart would take him out.
So if I were your enemy, I would constantly be dangling the right carrots to try to get you to live without a breastplate on.
If I were your enemy, I would be dangling the carrot, not the one that would bother her or bother him.
It ain’t a carrot. I would dangle the one that I have studied and I have seen.
True, that will a lure you away from walking in holiness.
Have you ever noticed that that carrot is always dangled when you are most vulnerable when you’re most lonely when you feel most isolated, when you’re most hungry.
When you’re most frustrated When you’re most in a season of longing, y’all that’s because it’s not coincidence, it’s a scheme.
The enemy wants us bound, living in every kind of wayward lifestyle and habits.
He wants us addicted. He wants us walking in sin and walking in Rebellion.
He don’t mind if you’re a churchgoer, he don’t mind if you’re a song singer, he doesn’t mind if you’re a hand waver.
He doesn’t mind. If you come to the conference once a year, hear what he doesn’t want.
Is you walking in holiness on monday and on a regular Tuesday and in your decision making on Wednesday, and then on thursday and friday and saturday, he don’t want you choosing holiness because holiness means you have blocked him out from a full frontal attack on your life.
Oh, I’m telling you to be holy.
I’m telling you to lay aside every weight and every sin which so easily entangles you.
There’s a race to be run. You’re running a race. We have a finish line to cross.
Aren’t you tired of carrying all that baggage?
I came to ask you this morning, who you belong to, jesus Said in order to have a conversational relationship with me in order to have access to the privilege of hearing the voice of God.
You gotta make sure that we are in a relationship, he said, my sheep are the ones who will hear my voice.
I didn’t come this morning to ask you whether or not you go to church, I’m glad you do.
But you can be in church and still not have a relationship.
I didn’t come this morning to ask you whether you do good stuff, I hope you do, but that ain’t got nothing to do with whether or not you got a relationship with jesus christ, I hope that you, that you serve in your local church and that you’re a great family member, I pray that even you have relatives, fathers and mothers and grandparents, I pray that many of you have a legacy of faith.
But I came to tell you that God doesn’t have grandkids just because your father and mother place faith in jesus christ does not mean that it automatically trickle down to you.
You must have your own relationship with jesus christ and it is not politically correct in our seeker sensitive church culture to say this anymore, but listen, you invited the wrong person for political correctness because I am going to tell you that there still is only one way to have a relationship with God.
Only one way and his name is jesus christ.
He has always been the way the truth and the life, some people who are skeptical of our faith, they often ask how could a God who is supposedly so good give seven billion plus people on the planet who are from different backgrounds and different cultures and different ethnicities and different parts of the world, different languages, different experiences, how could a God who is supposedly so good give all of those people only one way.
And while that’s a good question, it’s not the right question.
The question is not how could a God who is supposedly so kind, give all of us only one way.
The question is, how could a God who is so holy give us anyway to have a relationship with him?
But he loved us. He loved you.
He loved me so much that he sent his only son and his son became a bridge between humanity and its unholy nous and the Almighty God and his holiness, jesus himself is the bridge that connects the dots so that you can have a relationship and a meaningful, intimate friendship with God, jesus christ.
When you place faith in him, you become a part of the family of God.
I wonder if you’ve needed a second chance.
I wonder if you look back over your history and you can just pause for a moment and celebrate the goodness and the grace of God to you, giving you another opportunity that you did not deserve giving you another opportunity to walk in his purposes when honestly, if left to our own devices, he’s should have put us up on the shelf a long time ago, especially since he does not need us to partner with him in his kingdom purposes in order for them to be fulfilled.
It is his grace and his mercy, his goodness and his kindness to us that allows us the privilege to partner with him.
And so his mercy is most beautifully shown when we look back over our history and realize the times we’ve tried to circumvent him or ignore him or push off what he’s asked us to do, procrastinating when he has given us clarity on what his goals and his plans are, what his will is for us in a day or a week or a month or a certain so season of our life as husbands and wives and parents and single men and women and as Children, as employers, as employees, as ministry leaders.
When God has given us clarity and we stubbornly hard heartedly turned our back on him.
There is good news for you.
If you find yourself in that place today, He is a God of 2nd chances.
And I want you to know that God’s grace is sufficient for even you, even me, meaning, there is nothing that you have done.
There is nowhere that you have been.
You have not fallen so far or gone backwards so many steps, you have not dug a pit for yourself that is so deep that his arm now is too short that he cannot save you, that his ear is too dull that he cannot hear you, you and I are not powerful enough to be able to escape the goodness and the Grace and the mercy of God.
You know oftentimes when I pray and say, Lord show me your will for my life, when I pray that and and people that I know when we pray that, what we mean is Lord show me the next 20 years.
I want to know the full expression of everything you’ve got planned for me.
We want to know what God has planned for the next 20 years.
And most often God is saying if I can just get you to be obedient for the next 20 minutes, If you can obey me in 20 minute increments, 24 hour days, what is it that I have asked you to do today in this moment, in this opportunity, in this season, in this moment, in your ministry or in your parenting at this stage at this point of the process.
Instead of looking forward, if I can just get you to lean into what I’ve asked you to do today, the things that I have already required of you, you will see that you begin to walk in my will for your life sometimes because you are so struggling to contend with the discouragement that you may be feeling.
I mean I mentioned earlier, there have been two solid years of loss and grief in our family.
We have lost eight family members in the past two years a year ago.
This time my mother slipped away to eternity.
I was holding her, she was laying in my arms literally when she took her last breaths And then this past August just seven or 8 months later my mother in law who was healthy and fine.
She went to go take a nap in our home and never woke up.
So just in the past year the grief, the loss of course, that compounded with what we’ve all experienced this year with the pandemic and over the past months the racial unrest, the political concerns, everything that has happened globally, everything seems like it is just tilted on its axis just a little bit and sometimes life can be so hard.
One thing piled on top of the other that sometimes like Elijah, all you can do is find enough energy to muster up some words in prayer, but you need a companion that you send out that has enough faith and enough patience to keep their eyes peeled to the horizon when you are not able to do it.
This servant, this friend of Elijah six times was willing to go keep looking and keep looking and keep looking.
And even when he didn’t see anything, he was willing to walk beside allies in the process of watching God work something out on his behalf.
Do you have people around you that love you enough that our patient enough that are discerning enough that not only will they keep on looking when you are too discouraged to keep your eyes open and peeled to the horizon of what God is doing, but they are also so excited about when God moves.
That even when what they see just amounts to a cloud the size of a man’s hand, they don’t discount it.
They don’t devalue it. They come running back to you with the good news of what it is that they have begun to see God.
Do You need friends like that?
And I don’t know if any of you have ever needed a second chance. A third chance.
I don’t know if there’s anybody in the house other than me that’s ever needed a 20th.
His grace is sufficient for you that you do not have.
I don’t have the capacity to wear God out. You’re not that powerful. Somebody needs to be encouraged tonight.
And I drove over from the south side of town just to encourage somebody that it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve needed to redo how many times you’ve needed to back step just a little bit and get the forgiveness and the grace of God.
I came just to remind you that God’s got enough patience for even you that he doesn’t need a good nap before he can handle what’s going on in your life.
We don’t have the capacity to wear God out.
This whole assignment would have bristled against elijah’s sensibility because he was being sent to this unfamiliar place.
Not only was he not gonna connect with a king there, but he was being sent to a widow there, the weakest, most vulnerable person on the socioeconomic ladder in this day and age, She was a marginalized person and on the fringes of society, but in this grand, beautiful, sweeping view of the grace and the goodness of God.
Yeah. Caraway sends his prophet across state lines across territory lines out of the boundaries of what would represent the nation of Israel, the people of God.
He sends him in unfamiliar territory to a person that most people would have completely disregarded.
And can I just tell you that this is a beautiful arrow that points us all the way into the new testament when jesus and luke.
Chapter four would say, listen, I want to tell you who I am and the breadth of everything I’ve come to do by reminding you that in the time of Elijah, Jesus would say in luke Chapter four, there were many widows that were in Israel in Elijah’s day, but that’s not where I sent Elijah.
I sent Elijah to a widow that was in zero fat specifically and strategically because in that moment we get to see the grand view of the redemption story beginning to take shape and aren’t you glad that the grace of God, the redemption of God, the goodness of God, the forgiveness of God, the mercy of God is not just for some people in a particular place, but that it pushes pass passed all barriers and past boundaries and it reaches people like us who have strikes against us, who have a history who have a past who may be marginalized or ostracized the disenfranchised the down and out.
His great when jesus saw them authentically who they were dealing with, the struggle that they were dealing with.
When they approached Jesus, what reposed everybody else drew jesus near, I’m saying draw near to him and he will draw near to you, the other people in your life and mine who said they were gonna go the distance with you.
But they bowed out after year one or year to that friend that said she’d walk with you till the end.
That spouse that said they would walk with you till the end.
That mother or father or sibling that you feel betrayed by or abandoned by because they couldn’t handle it when you told them authentically what was going on in your heart or your mind or in your life and they walked away, I need you to know that there is one who will never leave you nor will he forsake you.
Somehow, Jesus is drawn to our cry for mercy and he is not repulsed by what Repulses other people from us