Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

So I’ll take you back many, many years ago when I graduated from college.  I think I’ve mentioned before that my first job took me to New York City.  I worked for a company that was based on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan.  I was there for several months of training before they dispersed us around the country to different places where the company had divisions and operations.  I eventually got moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.  Not a bad place to be.  And I remember when I arrived there I was getting ready to start my new job in sales and marketing.  And I needed a place to live.  And so I looked around at some apartments.  And, boy, they were pricy.  And trying to figure all that out with the income that I was making and so forth.  Long story short, I ended up finding a roommate who was also at the apartment complex that day.  A guy that had just graduated from college, came to the city, was in sales and marketing too.  It seemed like a good idea just to room together, right?  I wouldn’t recommend ever rooming with anybody just on the fly like that, but that’s what I did.  And he was a nice enough guy.  I’ll just call him Todd.  And Todd and I became friends and shared an apartment together for a year.  But we couldn’t have been more different people.  I was from the Midwest.  I was from Indiana.  Todd was a good ol’ southern boy from South Georgia.  He was the kind of guy that took a one syllable word and turned it into two or three syllables.  You know what I’m talking about?  But just as nice as can be, as friendly as can be, you know, nice family, good manners, all that.  Well, one day Todd came home to the apartment.  And it had been a rough week, but it was a Friday.  And he was all excited about the weekend, especially because that night he had a date.  He had a date…not just any old date.  He had a date with the boss’s daughter. Now, if you want to play with fire you get a date with the boss’s daughter.  But Todd went down that road.  He had been talking about it for a long time.  He got the courage up.  He even talked to the boss himself about going out with his daughter.  That night he had a date with the boss’s daughter.  And he was all excited about it.  And then he realized, oh, it’s time to get ready.  Now, his room was on that side of the apartment.  Mine was on this side.  We never really kind of got into each other’s stuff.  But I could tell kind of looking around the corner that Todd always had a real big pile of laundry on the floor.  Never quite made to, you know, the washer, the dryer, all that kind of stuff.  And now he was in a hurry because he was running late.  And he starts digging through that pile of laundry looking for, I guess…well, he came out with a shirt, his favorite shirt.  And I’m thinking to myself, this is not going in the direction that I think it should go.  But nonetheless, he held it up and did the sniff test and said, “Well, I think it’ll just have to do for the boss’s daughter tonight.”  And I thought, well, okay.  Tell me how that goes for you.  But he went out on his date with a wrinkly old shirt stanked up from the last time he wore it.  And Todd and I roomed together for a year or so, and we went our different ways.  I assume he got married.  But I don’t where he is today, but I can probably guess he didn’t marry the boss’s daughter.  Just my guess.  I mean, I don’t know what you…I doubt that he ever had a second date with the boss’s daughter because she probably saw him walk through the door and went, “Whew!”  You know?

0:03:46.0

Now, why do I tell you that silly story?  True story, by the way, true story.  And I mean no offense by saying this, but some of us are kind of like old Todd when it comes to our relationship with God.  We think it’s just all right to walk in to the holy presence of God with a little sin stank on our shirt here or sin stain over here.  And a study of the Tabernacle tells us otherwise, especially a study of the bronze laver, which is the second piece of furniture you come to as you step inside the outer court of the Tabernacle.  It was described in those verses I just read, Exodus 30:17-21.  But let me just retrace some of our steps.  Remember, the Tabernacle is that portable worship facility that God instructed Moses to build for the Israelites after they had left Egypt and as they were on their way to the Promised Land, a journey that took them 40 years to make.  But this portable worship facility, the architectural plans came from God.  It wasn’t Moses’ idea.  It wasn’t man’s idea.  It was actually a replica of what the scripture says is in heaven.  And God wanted a replica of this one earth and a place where He could dwell with man.  What a profound thought that a holy God who created heaven and earth would want to hang out with people like you and me.  Are you kidding me?  But this is what God desired.  A place to dwell with sinful human beings.  And so the Tabernacle becomes the answer to the question, how does a holy God dwell with sinful human beings?  Or, to turn that around, how can you and I enter into the holy presence of God?  The Tabernacle is a picture of spiritual realities.  It’s a picture of Jesus Christ.  And that’s why we’ll spend as much time in the New Testament and we do the Old Testament.

0:05:48.6

But each one of these pieces of furniture that we find, two of them in the outer court of the Tabernacle, and the inside the tent of meeting to the Tabernacle itself there is the Holy Place and then the Most Holy Place.  And as we make our way through the outer courtyard all the way into the Holy Place, we’re gonna learn how—on God’s terms, not ours, but on God’s terms—we enter into His holy presence.  And last time we were together we talked about the first object that you come to as you walk through the one door, through the outer court tent and you step into the outer courtyard.  You come to the bronze altar.  It’s a place of sacrifice.  The first thing that grabs your attention are all the smells of the sacrifice, the scene, the bloody scene, all of that that you can think about in terms of the Old Testament sacrifice.  And we said it was a picture of Jesus Christ and His sacrifice on the cross.  The bronze laver comes after the bronze altar.  And it is between the altar and the Tabernacle itself.  And beyond the bronze altar only the priest would go.  So the worshipers, the Israelites, could bring their sacrifice.  They could walk through the one door into the outer courtyard.  They could offer their sacrifice with the help of the priest.  Beyond that though, the priest represented the people.  And the priest had to stop off at the bronze laver to cleanse themselves, to cleanse themselves.  It was a place of cleansing before they walked into the Holy Place.  And, in fact, the scripture tells us there in Exodus 30 that if they didn’t stop off at the bronze laver to cleanse themselves they would surely die.  This was serious, serious business that God was speaking to the Israelites in the way they worshiped Him.

0:07:51.8

Now, again, all of this is a picture of spiritual realities that we learn more about in the New Testament.  And we’ll unpack some of that.  But let’s talk a little about some of the theology here.  I mentioned that the bronze altar was a picture of Christ’s sacrifice.  In the Old Testament they sacrificed the blood of bulls and goats and unblemished lambs. And they did it over and over and over and over again.  It was a bloody scene in the Old Testament.  But it was all to foreshadow and to be a type of and a picture of the once-for-all sacrifice who is Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins, the one that John the Baptist says, “Behold, here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”  This is so important to understand in the bronze altar.  The bronze altar is a picture of Christ’s sacrifice.  The key world theologically to understand here is the word justification.  I don’t say that to impress you with theological language or to bore you with theological language.  I say this because this word “justified” or “justification” is in our Bibles.  You can’t read Paul’s letter to the Romans without, you know, getting your heart and your mind around this theological idea of justification.  What does it mean to be justified in God’s eyes?  It means having been declared a sinner, God has declared you now righteous because of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross applied to you and applied to me.  Some people flippantly say it means “just as if you’ve never sinned.”  Oh, no.  Having been found guilty as a sinner, now, because of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf, we are declared righteous in God’s eyes.  That’s the idea of justification.  And justification happens once in a believer’s life, at the moment of salvation.  And it’s how we enter into a relationship with God.  The Bible is full of relational kind of language.  Jesus says you must be born again to enter into the kingdom of heaven.  There’s a physical birth that we all understand, but there’s also a spiritual birth where we’re born into the family of God, where we become a child of God by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and we are in relationship with Him.  That’s all pictured and understood at the bronze altar.

0:10:18.6

The bronze laver, though, pictures how we live the Christian life going forward.  It’s not about Christ’s sacrifice.  But the image behind the bronze laver…and we’ll talk about the physical aspects of it, but they picture two very important partnerships and realities in the Christian life.  And that has to do with the Word of God and the Spirit of God and how they are used of God to bring about, not our justification, but—here’s another important theological term—our sanctification.  Sanctification is how we grow more and more into the likeness of Jesus.  If justification happens once at a time when somebody places his or her faith in Christ, sacrifice is a lifelong process.  These are understood in the tenses that are used in the New Testament regarding our salvation.  So there’s a past, present, and future tense that we find in the New Testament.  Namely, we have been saved.  That’s a point in time when you were justified through your faith in Jesus Christ.  We are being saved, the New Testament says.  That’s sanctification.  That’s everyday living out the Christian life and growing into likeness with Christ.  And then we will be saved.  That’s called glorification, where one day we will be with Christ.  We will be with Him in heaven face to face.  So those three tenses in the New Testament, the way salvation is described, are important.  And they’re pictured in the Tabernacle.  We have been saved when we come to altar, to the cross of Christ, justified before Him.  But as we live this thing called the Christian life, we are being saved and sacrifice.  And the bronze laver is a picture of that.

0:12:10.7

Furthermore, it’s a picture, not of our relationship with God, but the fellowship, the intimacy that we enjoy with Him or potentially enjoy with Him as believers.  You know the difference between relationship and fellowship, don’t you?  If you're married you do.  Husbands, wives, you’re in relationship.  You’re legally in relationship with one another.  You have a marriage contract.  You have a marriage ceremony, rings, all that that you can point to.  But there are times that husbands and wives are not in fellowship with one another.  Maybe this morning was one of those times.  Maybe last night you lost fellowship with one another.  You said some cross words to one another.  It’s possible.  Don’t look at me like that’s never happened to you before.  It’s happened to the pastor and the pastor’s wife on occasion, right?  We all understand that in our relationships.  We can be family.  We can be married to one another, but there’s just something between us that’s not right.  And it’s broken our fellowship and our intimacy.  That happens in our relationship with God too.  Oh, we don’t lose our salvation.  We don’t lose our relationship with Him, our standing with Him.  But we don’t enjoy the fellowship and the intimacy with the holy God.  The bronze laver helps us understand how we receive daily cleansing so that we continuously enjoy that fellowship and that intimacy.

0:13:41.2

Now, with that in mind, let’s talk about some of the spiritual realities. Of all the detailed plans that God gave to Moses to build the Tabernacle, the one piece of it that involves the least amount of detail is the bronze laver.  You get a little bit of a description in Exodus 30.  And then in chapter 38 and verse 8 we’re given a little bit more description.  The Bible says that He, that is, Moses, “made the basin of bronze and its stand of bronze, from the mirrors of the ministering women who ministered in the entrance of the tent of meeting.”  That’s not much to go on, but we do learn a couple of things.  We learn that it was made of bronze like the bronze altar.  We also learn that this wash basin…and you have to use a little bit of an imagination, as artists have, as to what this basin might have looked like.  But they grabbed some mirrors that the women of the time might have had.  And they used that to probably layer the inner portion of the laver.  And then they poured water into it.  And after the priests did their duties at the altar, on their way to the Holy Place they would stop off at the bronze laver.  And they would wash themselves.  They would cleanse themselves.  And as they would, they would lean over.  And they would not only see the reflection of themselves in the water, but also in the mirrored basin there.  You get the picture?  And this was a ceremonial cleansing.  Again, if the priest skipped this step and walked into the Holy Place, the scripture says he would surely die.  This was very, very serious business.

0:15:24.6

Now, the water and the mirrors are both pictures of spiritual realities in the New Testament.  Let’s talk about those.  First of all, the Bible is like the mirror.  Why do we say that?  Because James in James 1:22 and following says these words.  “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.”  You don’t want to be a deceived person today, do you, just hearing the Word of God and not putting it into practice?  He says, “For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man,” listen to this, “like a man who looks intently at his face in a mirror.  For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he is like.”  Now, how many of you got up this morning and you looked in the mirror.  That’s true for most of us, right?  We get out of bed.  We, you know, kind of rub our eyes.  We wake up in a foggy sleep.  And we stumble to the bathroom.  And we look in the mirror, and we go, “Oh me, oh my,” you know.  James uses that analogy.  And he says the person who is a hearer of God’s word only and not a doer is like the person who looks in the mirror, kind of scratches his head, and then walks away and forgets what he looks like.  Forgets that he has to bathe himself, put on a fresh set of clothes, comb his hair or her hair and kind of get ready for the day.  How many of you just rolled out of bed and threw something on this morning and just came to church the way you were when you rolled out of bed five seconds ago.  We don’t do that, do we?  We look in the mirror.  And here’s the funny thing about mirrors.  They don’t lie to us, do they?  We wish they would, you know.  You’d like to get one of those mirrors that make you look more skinny or more handsome or more beautiful or whatever it might be.  Or maybe somebody else’s reflection in the mirror.  But the mirror doesn’t lie.  The Bible…this is a simple analogy.  The Bible is like that mirror.  And when we open up the Word of God, it doesn’t lie to us.  And it reflects to us the condition of our heart.  And sometimes it says to us, after a word of encouragement or a word that might strengthen us for the day, it also might say to us, “Something is not right.  Your hair is sticking up over here, metaphorically speaking.  And you’ve got to correct something in your life before you go meet with God.”  So the bronze laver was like that.  The priest would come.  As he would cleanse, there would be a reflection.  And it’s a picture of us coming to bronze laver, the Word of God, every day for a time of cleansing.

0:18:18.8

Now, the other part of this is the water.  And the water here is a picture of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is described in a lot of ways in the Bible.  But He is also described here in water terms.  John 7 is a good place to go.  John 7 beginning in verse 37.  It tells us that Jesus was at the Feast of the Tabernacles, one of the Jewish feasts.  “On the last day of the feast, the great day,” John says, “Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.’”  He was speaking in spiritual terms.  And then he goes on to say, “‘Whoever believes in (0:19:00.1) me, as the Scripture has said, “Out of his heart…”’”  Listen to this, “‘“Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”  Now this he said about the Spirit,” that’s the Holy Spirit, “whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”  Jesus was doing a little teaching here about the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit hadn’t come yet.  That wouldn’t happen until the day of Pentecost after Jesus had ascended to the Father.  But He describes the Holy Spirit, which those who believe receive.  He describes the Holy Spirit as a river, a river of living water.  Do you know that you have a river of living water living inside of you if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ?  And that’s the Holy Spirit.  He came to live (0:20:00.0) inside of you at the moment of salvation, at the moment you were justified in God’s eyes through faith in Jesus Christ.  The Holy Spirit came to take up residency in you.  The question is always, is He president of you?  It’s one thing to be resident in you, it’s another thing to be president of you.  But Jesus here pictures a Holy Spirit that’s not just a little bubbling brook.  Oh no, this is a raging, white-capped picture of holy water running through our lives when He is set free and set loose to do all that the Holy Spirit desires to do in our lives.  And what I’m simply saying is that the bronze laver, which pictures the mirror which is the Word of God, and the water, which is the Holy Spirit of God, our Father in heaven uses those two things in our lives to bring about our sanctification.  Okay?

0:20:53.8

They’re sanctifying elements to make us more like Christ.  A.B. Simpson in his fabulous work on the Tabernacle brings it together this way.  He says, “God’s Word is the cleansing stream of the Spirit.”  He says it better than I do.  I say the Holy Spirit does not work in us apart from the Word of God.  And, yes, the Word of God does not work in us apart from the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit pictured as the water in the laver and the Word of God pictured as the mirror, God uses them together in our lives to cleanse us and to bring about sanctification.  And here is how it works.  I know you didn’t come to church this morning without bathing physically.  But is it possible that maybe you came to church this morning without bathing spiritually?  When was the last time you opened up the Word of God and let the Spirit of God teach you?  Let the Spirit of God point out some areas of your life that might not be rightly related to Him.  Yeah, bring about a little bit of that uncomfortable conviction of the Holy Spirit in some sin stank or sin stain in your life or my life. And you let the Word of God mirror a reflection in your life where your heavenly Father says, “Hey, something needs to change here.  Something that you did back here on Tuesday or Thursday or last month or three years ago, the last time we had a conversation about things.”  But the Holy Spirit, in partnership with the Word of God, and the Word of God in partnership with the cleansing activity of the Holy Spirit brings that sin stank to your memory and calls us to deal with it.  Yes, sometimes in a very uncomfortable kind of way.  But we’re not gonna get into the Holy Place, into a real intimate relationship with the holy God by bypassing the bronze laver.  And here is what became very convicting to me and very telling of the Christian life.  A lot of Christians would find themselves, if the truth were known, stuck somewhere between the bronze altar and the bronze laver.  Oh, they’ve come to faith in Christ.  They’re in relationship with Him.  They’re part of the family of God.  They're a child of God.  They know they’re going to heaven.  But that’s about as far as they go.  They never really experience joys of intimacy with the holy God in the Most Holy Place where He wants us to go because they either refuse to come to the bronze laver or they don’t understand the dynamic here.  They rarely open up the Word of God, the mirror.  They don’t understand the dynamic ministry of the Holy Spirit to wash us with the water and with the Word of God and, yes, to bring to our attention those things in our life that are not rightly related to us and to receive cleansing before we go any further.  So it’s possible as a believer in Jesus Christ, yes, to be heading to heaven.  But you’re stuck somewhere between the altar here and the laver and the next step into the Holy Place.  And we need to understand all of these dynamics.

0:24:23.6

I think this is what Jesus was trying to teach His disciples on the night before He was crucified.  He used bronze laver kind of language in the upper room.  Do you remember the time when Jesus asked His disciples to get an upper room, and they were gonna have a Passover meal together.  And they all came to this upper room.  And they found Jesus with a basin of water and towel.  And He was getting ready to wash their feet.  Now, understand the customs of that day.  They wore a different kind of clothing than we did.  And they usually wore open-toed kind of sandals.  And as they walked around the city their feet would get dirty.  So it was very common to go into someone’s house or a restaurant or a business place and there would be some water, a basin of water, and a towel and usually a lowly servant who would wash your feet as you came in.  The disciples were shocked that Jesus did this.  And, yes, it speaks of the lowly, humble servant that He was.  And they were so shocked that even Peter says, “Oh no, Jesus.  You can’t wash my feet.  I ought to be washing your feet.”  And that whole scene that took place there.  And do you remember what Jesus said to old Peter?  In John 13, Peter said to Him, “You shall never wash my feet, Jesus.”  And Jesus said to Peter, “If I do not wash you, you have no share with me.”  What did He mean by that?  Sounds a little bit like…you know, in the Old Testament, “Priests, if you don’t wash at the laver and you go further in, you will die.”  It was serious business.  What was Jesus saying here when He says, “You will have no share with me?”  I’ll come back to that.  Simon Peter said to Him, “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.”  I mean, when Peter learned that he might not be getting something that Jesus wanted to give him, he says, “Listen, don’t just wash my feet, but wash me from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet.”

0:26:28.7

And then Jesus goes on, and He says, “The one who has bathed does not need to wash except for his feet, but is completely clean.”  Oh, there is such an important spiritual reality here to get.  The one who is bathed, the one who has received cleansing from his sin at the altar—you’ve been cleansed, you’ve been washed, you’ve been forgiven by God, you’ve got to faith in Christ—Jesus says, “He doesn't need to be cleaned from his head to his toe.  He just needs his feet washed.”  Kind of like Peter who probably got up that morning, took a bath, put on some fresh clothes, went out into the day, but picked up some defilement, some dirt along the way on his feet.  Walked into the upper room.  Peter didn’t need to take a shower from head to toe to have dinner that night.  No, he just needed his feet washed.  And what Jesus is saying is, “Peter, you…all except for Judas,” He says, “you’re already clean.  You’ve been washed.  It’s a picture of justification. He says but we’re still sinners.  And we walk in this sinful world.  And we pick up some sin stank and some sin stain, some defilements along the way.  And that has to be cleansed.  It has to be cleansed every day.  And so Jesus was giving a picture here, really of the bronze laver and of that sanctifying effect of the Word of God and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  Because here’s the danger, friends.  We can be like my friend Todd who thinks it’s just all right to go out on a date with the boss’s daughter with a stinky, smelly, stanked up shirt and that we can walk into the presence of God to same way.  Oh, we’ve been washed.  We don’t need it from head to toe.  We’re believers in Jesus Christ.  But we walk through this world.  We’re still sinners, albeit saved by the grace of God.  And we pick up stank here and a stain there, the defilements of the world, and they need to be cleansed on a daily basis.  The Word of God has a role in that, and so does the Holy Spirit.  So when was the last time you took a shower?  Did you get up this morning and look into the mirror, which is the Word of God, and let the cleansing water of the Holy Spirit pick up that word and cleanse you and wash you?  Some of you, you’ve got so much dust on your Bible.  It’s been a long time since you’ve taken a spiritual shower.

0:29:19.5

This past week my daughter was home from college for her fall break.  And we did a lot of fun things together, her mom and I did.  Her brother was still back at school.  Their fall breaks didn’t coincide.  But we had Caroline home.  And yesterday on her last day here we went to Bergey’s Bread House or Breadstick.  I don’t know, something like that.  They had a great ice cream there.  It’s kind of a working farm.  And this time of year, you know, they do the corn maze, and they had the petting zoo for the kids.  And we just went over there.  And most of them little kids, but, you know, we just had a great time, the three of us together.  And, again, it’s kind of a working farm.  And, you know, there are pigs, and there are goats.  And, you know, there are bulls.  And, you know, you can go around and see all of them.  Now, I’m only one generation removed from the farm.  My dad grew up in a farm in Iowa.  I didn’t grow up on a farm.  He left that.  But, yeah, I’m just one generation removed.  But I’m not real comfortable on the farm.  I don’t know all the ins and outs of it.  And every once in a while when I get a strong wind come in my direction, I smell that farm animal stank.  You know what I’m talking about?  Okay?  But what’s real interesting is people who grow up on a farm or they work on the farm, they’ve been around it so long they don’t smell that stank.  And that’s the danger in the Christian life.  You can be around your sin stank for so long, after a while you don’t smell it anymore.  That’s called a defiled conscience and a defiled mind.  It’s where the alarm bells that used to go off when you went in that direction just over time became more and more silent.  And you’re living in this stank and living with this stain.  And you're wondering, why do I not sense the holy presence of God anymore?  Why is this thing called the Christian life not working out?  I just can’t seem to live it.  Because every day, as believers we have to come to the bronze laver.  We have to let the Word of God give an honest reflection of where we are and let the Holy Spirit use the Word of God to cleanse us, to bring us to a time of conversation with God that involves confession.

0:31:44.2

And that leads me to a few applications here regarding some daily washings that I want to suggest need to take place in our lives.  Daily washings that will produce the power of a pure life.  You want power to live the Christian life successfully?  You’ve got to take a spiritual bath every day.  Okay?  Because you pick up those worldly and earthly defilements.  Here are three places where that daily washing needs to take place.  Number one is in the Church.  2 Corinthians 7:1, “Therefore, having these promises,” Paul writes to the church in Corinth, “having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.”  Paul writes this to one of the most defiled, dysfunctional, divisive churches you’ll read about in the New Testament.  This is the church in Corinth.  There was such defilement going on there that there was found to be some guy who was having sex with his father’s wife.  You want to talk about defilement.  And he says to this church, he says, “We have the promises of God.  We have the Word of God.  Now, beloved,”—that’s family language—“let us cleanse ourselves.”  Do you hear the personal responsibility there that you and I have as individual believers in the body of Christ to take this bronze laver and the picture of it seriously?  To cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit.  It’s those dirty, dusty feet and ankles that you get as you walk through life.  Don’t think you can walk into the holy presence of God with dirty feet and dirty hands and a dirty heart.  You’ve got to go to cleansing.  You’ve got to take your spiritual bath.  Titus 1:15 says, “To the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.”  We expect a defiled mind and a defiled conscience in an unbeliever who is unable to discern between right and wrong, good and evil.  But do you know it’s possible as a believer in Jesus Christ to defile your own conscience and your own mind?  Because you pick up the defilements of the world.  You don’t cleanse yourself every day with the Word of God and the Spirit of God and through a conversation with God we’ll talk about in a moment.

0:34:37.6

Well, let’s talk about it now, because here is the second place this daily washing needs to take place.  Not only in the Church, but in your personal life and in my personal life.  1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins…”  Here is the conversation we need to have with God.  “If we confess our sins,” say it with me, “he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  I call this the Christian bar of soap.  The Christian’s bath and shower he needs to take every day.  By the way, 1 John, that little postcard epistle that John wrote toward the end of your New Testament, it’s written to believers in Jesus Christ.  And it’s a book about, thematically, about having fellowship with God.  It’s written to people who are in relationship with Him.  They’re in the family of God, but it talks about how we maintain our intimate fellowship with Him.  And one of the first things John says is you’ve got to get honest and real, get real here about your sins.  “If we confess our sins.”  If we agree with God that what we’re doing is wrong.  Now, how do we know that what we’re doing is wrong?  Well, this is where the Word of God and the Holy Spirit come into play.  As you’re looking into the mirror, the mirror reflects the true reality of our hearts.  And the Holy Spirit uses that to bring conviction of sin.  But more than just convicting us, He wants to cleanse us.  But He can’t cleanse us until we confess our sins.  Now, some of you might have come from a Catholic background.  And you think, “Oh, Preacher, you’re saying I need to go to confession.”  Well, remember, the Protestant Reformation taught us something about New Testament theology, and that is we are all priests of God.  And the whole idea of the priesthood of the believer came out of the Protestant Reformation because Luther and other opened up their Bible and read it and learned about it in the New Testament.  In the Old Testament the priests represented the people.  But in the New Testament we are all priests of God.  And so you don’t have to go to a priest to confess your sins, although the New Testament does say it’s good for us to confess our sins to one another, to have safe relationships where you can go and have a conversation with somebody.  But confession is never complete until we go directly to God.  “If we confess our sins, he,”—I love this part—“he is faithful.”  Say, “God is faithful.”  (God is faithful.)  “He is faithful and [he is] just to forgive us of our sins.”  And He doesn’t stop there.

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To forgive us of our sins that the Word of God and the Holy Spirit brought to our attention through the conviction of the Spirit, now we’re having that conversation that leads to confession.  And He’s willing to forgive that when we confess.  But not just the sins we know about because we opened up our mirror and stared into it and because the Holy Spirit brought about that conviction, but then to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, even those sins we’re not aware of.  That’s a wonderful verse of scripture.  And if this isn’t a part of our practice every day…because we walk through life and we pick up all kinds of defilements- a stank here, a stain there, right?  We don’t need a full shower and a full bath.  No, we came to the altar.  We just need to get the defilements cleaned up.  If we don’t do this every day, we not only sacrifice intimacy with the Almighty and an audience with Him, but over time we don’t even smell our own stank anymore.  And we think everything is all right with God.  And He is saying, “No, we’ve got some things to deal with here.  Not just from last Tuesday, but maybe from three months ago or three years ago or whatever it might be.”  This is where a lot of people say 1 John 1:9 is the place to keep short accounts with God.  As soon as the Holy Spirit through the Word of God brings to attention an area of our life that is not rightly related to Him, He brings that disturbing conviction of sin, which is His duty and responsibility to do, but with the goal of cleansing us.  But He can’t cleanse us until confession happens.  Until we get down on our face before God, as it were, and we cleanse as the bronze laver.  And He cleanses us from all unrighteousness.  Now, now we’re ready to enter into that Holy Place.

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So you may be here this morning, and you’re saying, “Wow, this is the first I’ve ever heard of something like this, Pastor.  Now this is beginning to make sense.  I’m one of those persons that is stuck between the altar and over here, either because I didn’t have the courage or the desire to say, ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart.  Try me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.’”  You’ve got to come to your personal Bible study with that attitude.  You’ve got to open your life up to the searchlight of the Holy Spirit and say, “God, if there is anything in me that is defiled, that is offending your holiness, then show it to me.  And I want to get right with You on this matter now, confessing and forsaking my sins.  Cleanse me.  Wash me.  And then help me to walk forward.”  And then the next time we stumble and fall and we pick up some defilements as we always will, we just keep practicing 1 John 1:9.

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So in the Church, in our personal relationships.  Can I go one step further and meddle just a little bit more?  How about in your marriage?  How is the bronze laver, how does it find application in our marriage relationship?  Ephesians 5—real quickly here—verses 25-27.  “Husbands, love your wives,” Paul says.  Easy enough thing to do, right?  Until he goes on to say, “As Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”  Oh, husbands, we’re to love our wives sacrificially.  To sacrifice for her.  To give our all for her.  And our love ought not to just be sacrificing in nature, but also sanctifying in nature.  He goes on to say, “That he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word.”  Do you see how both the water and the Word are mixed into Paul’s language here, dropped right into the marriage relationship?  Here is my point, guys.  Let me ask you this question.  Is your wife more like Jesus today than on the day you married her because you love her and lead her sacrificially and in a way that encourages her sanctification in Christ?  That’s a tall order.  That’s our responsibility as husbands.  “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church that he might sanctify her.”  Are you leading your marriage and your family in a way where you’re not just your wife’s partner?  You’re not just the family provider.  But, men, husbands, you also see yourself as the family priest that brings the Word of God and the ministry of the Holy Spirit to your family life in a way that cleanses and sanctifies.  I know some brides that look more like Christ than they did on the day they were married in spite of their husbands.  But imagine what she would be like if she had a husband who loved her as Christ loved the Church and took on the responsibility of interjecting a sanctifying and Word of God and Holy Spirit kind of influence in that marriage relationship.  That’s a marriage worth hanging on to and going the distance on.

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And you get all that from the bronze laver, yeah.  I told you, every step into this Tabernacle, whoa!  There is some serious steps here.  And it’s why the scripture says in the Old Testament if the priest skipped or bypassed the bronze laver and went into that Holy Place he’d die.  It’s why Jesus said to Peter, “You’ll have no part of me.”  Not that you die, but there will be that feeling of death that comes over the believer in Jesus who is out of fellowship with the Father.  Do you know who the most miserable person on this earth is?  It’s not the unbeliever.  It’s not the person who doesn’t know Christ as his or her savior, because he or she doesn't know the difference.  It’s the person who has come to the altar, who has received the free gift of eternal life, but is so defiled by the world they’re not experiencing the fellowship and the intimacy with the Father for which you were made, for which you were saved.  That’s the most miserable person on this earth.

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Let me ask you this one question, and then we’re done.  Different analogy.  Suppose you went to the doctor today.  And he said, “You're as healthy as a horse, but we just noticed on this x-ray a little speck that we believe is cancer just right here on this part of your body.  Just a little speck.”  How would you treat it?  How would you expect your doctor to treat it?  The same way God expects us to deal with the slightest sin stank or sin stain or defilement we pick up from the world.  It’s that serious.  Because He is a holy God.  And he wants to invite us into His presence.  He wants to hang out with us.  He wants to dwell with us.  But we need cleansing.  We need spiritual chemotherapy to cleanse us daily from the cancerous defilements of this world.  That’s what the bronze laver is all about.  And my prayer, especially during this 21 days of renewal that we’re experiencing is that this kind of cleansing and renewal, that God would grab a hold of every one of our hearts including mine, and that we would say with the psalmist, “Search me, O God, and know my heart.  Try me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any, any speck, any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”  He will do that like a gentle shepherd who leads us.  He’ll do that through the mirror of His Word, through the cleansing water of His Holy Spirit.  But it only happens when we get honest with Him and get real with Him and confess our sins to Him.  Let’s pray together.

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Father, thank You for Your Word this morning.  Thank You for this picture from the Old Testament.  Thank You for telling us the truth about ourselves, for giving us the Word of God that, among other things, is like a mirror.  And I pray that as it reflects upon us today, Lord, that we would be honest with ourselves and with You.  And, Father, move us toward those times of cleansing even now.  I pray this in Jesus’s name and for His sake, amen.

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