Dr. M. Taylor Bach I Corinthians 4:1-5 Matthew 5:21-24

I've got a question for you this morning. What is the biggest spot in the world? What is the spot that everybody has? Have you ever heard of the blind spot? It is a part of everyone's personality. We all have a blind spot in our personality  that part of us that we don't even allow ourselves to see. We don't allow ourselves to be aware of it. Sometimes our friends see it. Sometimes our family sees it. But most of the time we don't see it. I've always been fascinated with the blind spot. When I had my counseling practice, I would go to training exercises and in these training exercises, my blind spot would be confronted. After my blind spot was confronted, I would go back to work with my clients and darned if I didn't suddenly see their blind spots when their blind spots were similar to mine. But before I would be confronted and have my blind spot exposed, I wouldn't see their blind spot either. Isn't that fascinating how that works? We can learn about our blind spots through the Bible because the Bible does convict us quite frequently of the blind spots that we have. Then we become aware that there are areas that we need to repair, there are areas where we need to grow, and there are parts of us that we need to fix.

In the epistle of to the Hebrews, Jesus is seen as the Pascal lamb. The Pascal lamb was supposed to be a perfect lamb without spot. Jesus was that perfect human because He was God in a man. He had no blind spots in His personality whatsoever. He had no evil within Him and yet He had the ability to see through people's blind spots and see through their defenses. He could look at a person and instantly know what was going on with them. He could instantly know because He could read their minds and read their hearts.

As we go through this sermon series on Discipleship, today's emphasis is on purity. I am not just going to speak about the common thought of purity, sexual purity, but I want to speak today about the broader purity that occurs in fixing ourselves, that covers far more than just sexual blind spots. There is what I would see a number of spots that we need to look at.

The first is faith. We need to have pure faith. The epistle to the Hebrews says this about faith: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” This is what the ancients were commended for. Pure faith is something that we believe without visual proof of it. That is difficult. So most all of us are like Thomas. Do you remember Thomas when Jesus appeared to the twelve and Thomas wasn't there after Jesus' resurrection from the dead? What happened? Thomas came back to be with the twelve and they said, “Hey, Jesus rose from the dead. We've seen Him with our own eyes. We've seen His body. He came and was among us.” And Thomas said, “I'm not going to believe that until I can put my hands into His scars.” Then Jesus appeared again with Thomas present. And Thomas fell to his knees and said, “My Lord and my God,” when Jesus urged him to feel the scars where the nails had been. But then Jesus said, “Blessed are those who believe without seeing,” which is going to be all of us. So to the degree that we can purify our belief, to the degree we are keeping the commandment of Jesus, we will be blessed.

There was an interesting show on television this past week. Maybe some of you caught it. It was on 20/20. I think Elizabeth Vargas hosted it. The gist of the show was&how do people survive horrible accidents or a horrible crisis. It was inspired by the airplane that crashed into the Hudson River this past week. It was so exciting to hear what the researchers said. They said that faith in God was one of the key ingredients for surviving a horrible incident. So we Christians are rewarded in our religious life or walk. We are rewarded for our faith. Their research showed that if we are ever in a crisis situation, we have a better possibility of surviving that because of our faith. They said only 10% of the people generally have this within them. But all of those people said it was their faith that got them through it. So purity of faith becomes extremely important and is rewarded even in times of crisis, times of accidents, time of intense illness or something of that nature.

The second thing that we need purity in is thought. The scripture that we read this morning is about anger. If we read further, we get the lesson about adultery. In that scripture, Jesus says that if you look at a person with lust you have already committed adultery in your heart. You are sinning if you don't have a pure mind and have a pure thought process. We have to work at purifying how we think. We have to work at ridding ourselves of anger or lusts. We have to work at taking out of our minds those things which contaminate it and make it unholy. This is not an easy process to do but here is the secret. The conscious mind can only contain one thought at a time. So if you find yourself having a thought that is inappropriate and you don't want it, you can through an act of the will, replace that thought with something else. I often told my counselees you can think of hippopotamuses with hula hoops and put that thought in your mind to replace a thought that you think is sinful or ought not to be there. So we have the ability of putting a silly thing in our mind in order to clear our mind of a thought that we ought not to be having.

Dustin Hoffman is the movie star who played in the movie Rainman. Do any of you remember that? He played a savant which is a form of schizophrenia. After he played that magnificent role, he said it took him three months to think like a normal person again. He had so trained his mind to think like a crazy person, a schizophrenic savant, that after he was done with that role in the movie, to purify his mind and to clear his mind was a process that took him three months. That gives you some idea of the project that it is to purify our mind. If there are thoughts that we need to get out of our mind, it may take us three months to do it. But if you put your mind to it and catch yourself with thoughts that you don't want to have that are inappropriate, replace them with another thought because the mind can only have one thought at a time. You have the capability of purifying your mind. So that is one of the things that the scriptures are urging us to do.

The next thing that we find that needs purifying is our motives. That is a tough one. It is hard to do good works while always having pure motives. We might want to do good works to get noticed by somebody else. That is not a pure motive. You might want to do good works in order to receive a reward. That is not a pure motive. We might want to do good works of some kind just to impress somebody and that is not a good motive. There is this truth, that it is difficult to do anything with a single motive. Probably everything we do is contaminated to some degree by an impure motive. Look at the teenagers today. There is research about them, especially those that are unchurched, that says that their single goal is to have a moment of fame. That is why some teenagers will go out and do horrible things. They get their fifteen minutes of fame on television. They think they've arrived because they have killed someone or they beat up their classmate and put it on YouTube and therefore got their moment of fame. A horrible motive. Fame is hollow. Fame is shallow. The sin of older people might be money, motivation, greed. We find that a great deal in our society. Is it any wonder these people, when the stock market crashes, as it has recently done, find themselves battling suicide urges? They have nothing. They have lost their finances and that is what they lived for. That was their motive. That motive doesn't serve them in a downturn of the economy. Power is another motive that is very very enticing. A lot of people do things to have power over other people. This is frequently when people rise to leadership positions in businesses, climbing the corporate ladder and things like that. They do so because they like to have power over others. And yet having power over others was actually condemned by Jesus. That is what He saw in the Pharisees who lorded their Biblical knowledge and lorded their charity and lorded their display of religion over others. It was actually a form of legalism which was a way of controlling people. Legalism is having power over other people. Jesus roundly condemned that kind of power. Legalism when it raises its ugly head in the church is a horrible motive for doing things. What precisely is legalism? Legalism is finding rules, norms, maxims and laws and insisting that they absolutely have to be followed. If you don't follow them, then you are considered inferior. Jesus hated the Pharisees when they were legalistic and He urged us never to get into that frame of mind. So we are to purify our motives. Jesus said we only have to have one motive. “Seek first the kingdom of God and all things else will be given you besides.” If we could get into that mindset, that I do all things that I do as a way of seeking first the kingdom of God, putting Christ first in my mind as the object of my worship, then other things would be given us besides. He will take care of us. That is His promise.

The next way we have to purify ourselves is with our commitment. What are we committed to? Jesus had some interesting sayings about commitment. He said, “If anyone loves his father or mother more than me, he is not worthy of me. Anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And if anyone does not take up his cross and follow me, he is not worthy of me.” That is asking for an incredible purity of commitment. We love our relatives and that is as it should be. However, God always comes first. God should come before anything else. That is the commitment that we need to make. God first. Family second. Our work third. Our church right there with our work. That is the way it should be. Those are life commitments that we make. We make a commitment of our heart, soul, strength and mind, to love God before everything else. Then we work at loving our neighbor and committing ourselves to doing those kinds of things which serve humanity beginning with our own family. Have you ever noticed that the most difficult lessons of love occur in your own family, that it is easier to be angrier with family than anybody else? But it is more important to learn to love family members than anyone else. Then we work on the rest of society. We work on loving our neighbor, and loving even our enemies, Jesus said. So commitment, purity of commitment, is what He is asking of us.

Lastly, Jesus wants purity of behavior. When we do something, we are to do it with all of our might, to do it with excellence and to be absolutely committed to do things for the greater honor and glory of God. When we succeed at work and we are Christians, our unchurched co-workers see this excellence and realize that our motives are because of Jesus Christ. That is a powerful witness. Our behavior becomes a powerful witness when it is done with purity, when it is done with excellence. So these are the things that Jesus Christ is asking of us. Are they easy? No. Nobody ever said they would be. They require effort, they require sacrifice, and they require all of your strength. And that is what Jesus wants of you. Being a Christian isn't an easy life. It is a joyful life. It is an exciting life. It is a challenging life. It takes courage. It takes wisdom. It takes every fiber of our being to purify our motives, purify our thoughts, and purify our commitments.

To the degree that we achieve this and unite our self with the mind of Christ and the behavior of Christ, then we present ourselves with Christ “without spot,” as the Bible says, “or without wrinkle.”