Do The Right Thing

On the last Lord's Day, we continued our series on overcoming the sin nature in our lives entitled Proper Conduct For An Excellent People, with an exposition on a wonderful text housed in I Thessalonians 5:22 which says in the ESV abstain from every form of evil, which I entitled Do the Right Thing. I used for an introduction the main controversy found at the end of the film. Spike brought up the argument of two different ideals regarding the violence in the movie's conclusion. One ideal is that violence is never justifiable under any circumstances, and the other ideal was that violence is intelligent when done under the action of self-defense. Many scholars could not agree as to which ideal they would consider to be the correct one, so they basically decided to agree to disagree.

While that may work for movies, that is never tolerated when it comes our conduct as the people of God toward our Father in Heaven. I Thessalonians tells us that we must abstain from every form of evil. Why? Because our Heavenly Father wants to sanctify us for his good purpose, which means that he desires to set us apart for his use, but he can't do it while the wickedness of our lives is at the forefront of our desires. Here is the sermon outline:

Thesis: our ability to be set apart for the express purpose of God's exclusive use, hinges totally on our willingness to turn away from our wickedness and do the right thing.

I. Positional Sanctification

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II. Practical Sanctification

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III. Perfect Sanctification

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