Our Sexual Immorality; His Holiness and Inheritance
Passage: Ephesians 4.19; 5.3, 5
Date: January 22, 2023
The gospel of Jesus Christ includes receiving a new heart, which renews our mind, which in turn enables us to live a life where our actions and speech are filled with power, love, and self-control. We've been reflecting upon this over the past couple of weeks and this week, we see all these wonderful blessings in the context of sexual immorality.
Our struggle with sexual immorality begins with the mind. Because God has given us a new heart, our minds can now be renewed. We often don't realize that the reason why we fall into sexual immorality is that we are being misled by various lies. In the gospel of Christ, we have the power to identify these lies and replace them with truth.
Two truths stand out in today's passage: we have a new identity as "holy ones" (or "saints") and we have an inheritance. This sermon will explain both so that we can have a biblical understanding of how powerful these truths are.
On the one hand, we are already deemed as "holy ones" and our inheritance is fixed--this should provide us great assurance and this is captured in the idea of "justification." On the other hand, we are not yet completely "holy ones" and have not yet received the full inheritance--this leads us to the idea of "sanctification." All this explains why there is an unstoppable power/hope for the Christian while the Christian must still experience suffering and struggles.
