God Will Only Be Your Father If You Meet His Conditions

Guard your heart with all your strength, for everything there is in life comes out of it. And I have never forgotten that. Everything there is in life comes out of your heart.

If you want a good life, have a good heart. Have a pure heart. Have a clean heart. And if you defile yourself, ultimately, you are the one that will suffer the most.

Obeying the Bible is not really to be very pious. It’s to have common sense, because it works. Then God says,

“I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

God does not offer to be unconditionally a Father to anybody who wants it. He says,

“I’ll be a Father if you meet My conditions.”

And then Paul adds, “Therefore,” at the beginning of chapter seven. And you’ve probably heard me say, some of you, if you find a “therefore” in the Bible, you need to ask what it’s “therefore.” And this “therefore” is because of the previous two verses.

“Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves.”

Some things God does for us, and some things we have to do for ourselves. Now, there are many aspects of holiness which only God can do. But here is something which it is our responsibility to do.

“Let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit.”

Filthiness of the flesh, I think most of us have a pretty clear idea of some of what’s entailed by that: sexual immorality, drunkenness, anger, swearing. But what about filthiness of the spirit?

I’ll tell you one thing that I think that is: every form of contact with the occult is filthiness of the spirit. And many, many Christians today, often unknowingly, are involved in the occult.

Many Christians read horoscopes. Is that right? Maybe not the ones here. But let me tell you that if you lived in Israel, under the Law of Moses, and you read horoscopes, you would have been put to death. That’s God’s estimate of it.

I’m not going to go into a list of occult things. It’s not my purpose. But I discovered in my own life that it took quite a lot of work on my part to eliminate the occult. For instance, at Cambridge, my main subject of study, on which I wrote my fellowship dissertation, was the philosophy of Plato. And many, many people admire Plato. You find many Christians. In fact, there’s a form of Christianity called Neoplatonism.

“Ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.”

So that’s a responsibility placed on us. I could spend the rest of this evening talking about how to do it, but that’s not my theme. My theme is we’re responsible to do it. This is not something God will do for us. This is something He tells us to do for ourselves.