THE PROMISE OF PURITY
A Sermon by
Dr. Walter A. Maier
Now are ye clean through the Word which I
have spoken unto you. — John 15,3.
ONE of the most
noteworthy distinctions of this remarkable age and of this remarkable
country is the unparalleled development of cleanliness and sanitation.
This is the cleanest age in history, and the United States is the
cleanest nation in the world. With all the cleaning devices, unknown a
generation ago, that are employed today in our American homes, with
our antidirt campaigns in modern industry and our clean-up and paint-up
movements in our residential communities, America is riding on the
crest of a great wave of purity propaganda that involves the annual
use of three billion pounds of soap and accounts for ten cents of every
dollar spent by our average family.
Surely one would be
entitled to conclude that, if there is any truth in the old maxim about
the proximity of cleanliness and godliness, this outward purity must
have produced a corresponding spotlessness of the heart and
stainlessness of the soul. With all our abhorrence of dirt, with the
nation-wide battle against germs and infection, we might suppose that
proportionate attention would be paid to guarding our inner life
against the contamination of sin and the filth of immorality.
But what are the
actual facts? Merely these: today some of the foulest forces that have
ever threatened the moral life of the American people are feverishly at
work. While we have always had garbage literature, it has never been as
cheap and as attractively garnished as now. When could you go into the
five-and-ten-cent stores and purchase a special “love” magazine with
all the cheap display in word and pictures that chokes off the clean
aspirations for which Jesus Christ stands? In Theodore Roosevelt’s
administration an exponent of the cult of physical culture was
arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced for disseminating lascivious
literature. today that man’s name is found on the cover of a group of
magazines which distribute their destructive influence in millions of
copies every month. Our parents and grandparents deplored the
influences of the theater in their day, twenty-five and fifty years
ago; but when was the whole gamut of passions presented with such
seductive allurement, on so colossal a scale and relatively at such
small cost as in our age, which so often has employed the fine
invention of the motion picture, the most popular form of amusement the
world has ever known, to blast away every vestige of personal purity? I
hold no brief for the past; but where, in the decades that have
preceded us, has any generation been confronted with a moral blight
such as meets us on all sides in the sophistication of our age, when a
premium is placed on impurity? A quarter of a century ago men who dared
to teach that man is a glorified animal and that the concessions to
his animal passions are unavoidable and not of serious consequence,
aired their blasphemies largely before atheistic societies and
organizations which the average man regarded as rather disreputable.
today teachers’ conventions greet these self-styled apostles of
enlightenment with a salvo of applause, and ministerial groups invite
them to explain their theories in clerical atmosphere.
You can understand
from this and from the deluge of other depressing facts which confront
every thinking observer that in this age of outward cleanliness, but of
inner decay, what we need above all is the consciousness of the present
low ebb of morality and the confidence in Christ’s promise of Tonight,
“Now are ye clean through the Word which I have spoken unto you.”
“NOW
ARE YE CLEAN.”
When I repeat that
our present age needs the happy transformation implied in our Lord’s
declaration to His disciples and to us who believe in Him, “Now are ye
clean,” I know, of course, that my words are diametrically opposed to
the lines drawn by the apostles of optimism, who think that human
progress can be measured by modern plumbing, by university degrees, and
by bank accounts. I know, too, that people today are not attracted by
the emphasis on sin, that is, their own sin. They are quite ready to
admit the gross and open forms of sin — in others. They are willing to
discuss narcotic traffic and racketeering and the gruesomeness of the
latest murder; but when you mention their own sins, the thinking of
impure and covetous thoughts, the speaking of unholy and damaging
words, the performance of selfish and injurious acts, you will find
that the short, three-letter word sin has been deleted from many modern
vocabularies and that the short, three-word sentence “I have sinned” is
one of the hardest confessions to wring from proud human lips. With
social service substituting for Christ’s service, with preachers rising
up in their pulpits to tell their congregations (and I am now quoting
verbatim from a recent sermon), “All talk of man’s needing an atonement
is an insult to God,” you can understand why there are so many modern
Pharisees who thank God that they are not like the common herd, who are
satisfied with cleaning the outside of the cup and the platter, —
“whited sepulchers,” outwardly beautiful, but inwardly “full of dead
men’s bones.”
But who is there in
this audience Tonight who, knowing the all-seeing eye of God, which
penetrates even into the deepest recesses of a hidden heart; who is
there who, hearing the scathing indictment of this sweeping word of
Scripture, “We are all as an unclean thing”; who is there who,
hearkening to the accusing voice of conscience, can still insist upon
his own purity and the stainlessness of his own character? Who is there
indeed who can take a true inventory of his life without admitting
with Isaiah, the greatest preacher of Christ in the Old Testament, that
his lips are unclean; without craving for purity of soul with penitent
David and praying, “Create in me a clean heart, O God!”?
But remember tonight
that our Lord, who transformed His disciples and told them, “Now are ye
clean,” will answer our prayers for clean hearts. You who are living on
in the sordid smirch of sin; you who are suffering from the
consequences of secret iniquity; you who are leading double lives; you
young people who think that purity is out of date and out of place in
our modern advancement; you elders whose souls are shrinking under the
withering touch of the sins of. unfaithfulness, of grasping greed, of
hypocrisy and lies, of hatred and envy; — when you find, as you must
find, that sin is the hardest of all hard masters; when you learn from
bitter experience, as you will learn, that the worst delusion on earth
is this, that sin can make you happy; when you cry out from the depths
of your soul for something to clean and purify you, knowing only too
well that no sinner can stand in the sight of the holy God, — here is
the promise, not my fallible opinion or the faltering conjecture of any
other human being, but the divine and unalterable pledge of Him whose
truth is higher than the heavens: “Now are ye clean” —
“THROUGH
THE WORD WHICH I HAVE SPOKEN UNTO YOU.”
Do not delude
yourself into believing that you can cleanse yourself; for as God told
Jeremiah: “though thou wash thee with niter and take thee much soap,
yet thine iniquity is marked before Me.” Do not think that you can
remove the stains of sin by the application of the score of theories
through which men have tried to improve human character and minimize
sin. They have used reason and argument; they have employed education
and training; they have tried punishment and prison; they have taken
recourse to psychology and surgery; they have experimented with
changed environment and changed diet; but all this, at best, has proved
as inadequate as an attempt to empty the Atlantic with buckets. For
though men may alter the course of rivers, move mountains, and separate
continents, this change from impurity to purity is too subtle to be
graphed or charted and too elusive to be recorded by the seismograph
which catches the convulsive tremors of a shaking world; too soul-deep
to be sounded by endless fathoms, too exalted to be touched by earth’s
highest reaches.
But thank God that
you have the promise of the text, “Now are ye clean.” How? “Through the
Word which I have spoken unto you.” That Word of Jesus, these
purifying, restoring promises of the Scripture, and these alone, offer
to all, however disfigured and discolored they may be with sins that
shriek unto the highest heaven, this precious, priceless promise of
purity, “The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all
sin.” That Word which calls out tonight to all the sin-laden who
sincerely and unreservedly repent of all their sins, “Though your sins
be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like
crimson, they shall be as wool”; that Word offers to all who trustingly
accept its truth and believe its promises the purging power of Christ’s
precious blood, so potent that it can do what the strongest chemical
can never do, cleanse the human heart forever of the stains of sin,
yes, of the sins themselves.
Have not the
centuries borne out the stupendous truth of this promise of Christ?
While He has exposed as no other the defiling sin of the human heart,
His pierced hand has directed the life path of His children from the
quicksands of sin to Himself, the solid Rock of Ages. Think of the
molding influence of His Word in history- A hundred years ago the
London Missionary Society sent its first workers to Madagascar, where
polygamy, unspeakable vice, the sacrifice of human beings, in fact,
all the corrupt practices of heathendom and none of the alleged virtues
(of which the opponents of mission-work speak so glibly) reigned in
unchecked sway. As soon as the Word of God was translated into the
language of the island, the purification which Jesus promises, began
its miraculous work, and the natives were transformed in soul and
changed in their lives. Then came a period of bloody persecution, in
which their faith and Christ like life was to be tried by death and
torture. The converts to Christianity were stoned, beaten, speared,
poisoned, hurled over precipices, persecuted by a thousand fiendish
inventions; but that Word of Christ, the Savior, which had been
preached to them had so thoroughly cleansed their hearts that amid the
agonies of the greedy flames more than one of these martyrs cried out,
as faithful witnesses have recorded, “O Lord, lay not this sin to their
charge.”
This transformation
to purity of heart and life which Christ’s Word has effected has left
the monuments to its power all over the globe and throughout history in
the lives of millions of twice-born men and women. Christ speaks to
persecuting Saul, and he becomes persecuted Paul. Augustine, the son of
a heathen father and a saintly mother, hears the Word, comes under the
conviction of sin, takes the Bible, and is changed from a sensualist to
a saint. Luther, collapsing under the crushing weight of unforgiven
sins, pages a Bible, and his astonished eyes read, “The just shall
live,” — not by their own virtues or the accomplishment of others, but
“by faith,” and that promise turns him from despair to the indomitable
confidence that marked his gigantic faith.
Today that Word has
not lost its power; it still purges and purifies. Show me a sweet,
unselfish girl who takes an interest in her home, extends a helping
hand to others, leads a clean and cheerful life, and is able to meet
temptations fairly and squarely, and I will show you that that girl
has a Bible in her room, that she is a faithful attendant at church,
and that her prayers mean something to her. And conversely, show me a
young man who has sowed his wild oats, who spends his evenings away
from home, whose conversation is sprinkled with profanity, whose
associates are discreditable, and who has lost a real interest in the
finer and nobler things of life, and I will show you that that young
man never thinks of the Bible, that he is through with Christ’s
religion. For, as true as is the happy promise of the apostle, “If any
man be in Christ, he is a new creature,” just so true, conversely, is
the Savior’s declaration, “ Without Me ye can do nothing.”
I pray to God that
there may be no one within the range of my voice who is engaged in the
disastrous tragedy of living without Christ and His saving and renewing
Word. For the yesterday of your life, with its sins and weaknesses that
a thousand years of human regrets can never remove, you need the
forgiveness promised in His Word; for your today with its temptations
and disappointments you need the strengthening that the Spirit gives
you through the Word; for your Tomorrow with all of its vague
uncertainties you need the hope that your Bible contains in exhaustless
measure. If you are not baptized, as His Word requires, you must have
that washing of regeneration. If you have turned your back on Christ,
you must have this Word to show you the folly of sin and the power of
Christ’s love, who as the great Good Shepherd leaves the flock of nine
and ninety in the wilderness to go and seek that one stray lamb until
He finds it. If the grace of God has preserved you in faith, you must
have His Word and employ it as your Savior employed it in His
temptations to meet the defiling allurements of a sin-soaked world.
Without this Word you stand hopeless and helpless, separated from God
by sordid sin; but with this Word, looking “Unto Him that loved us and
washed us from our sins in His own blood,” you — whoever you are,
whatever you are, wherever you are — have the purity of Heaven’s truth
to answer every question, to solve every problem, to lighten every
burden that may trouble your soul. Amen.
[From the book, "The lutheran Hour"
1931]