Please remain standing for our scripture lesson, reading from 2 Corinthians 6, verse 11, through chapter 7, verse 2. We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians. Our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return, I speak as to children, widen your hearts also. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore, go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing. And I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty. Since we have these promises beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. Make room in your hearts for us. We have wronged no one. We have corrupted no one. We have taken advantage of no one. Amen, dear saints. You may be seated. Today we're biting off another good chunk of two chapters of 2 Corinthians. Last Sunday we also handled a fairly long section. Next Lord's Day, Lord willing, we're going to recapitulate chapter 7 verse 2 and go through chapter 7 verse 4. So we'll be slowing down again a little bit. And we'll have another sermon in 2 Corinthians, Lord willing, on the 17th and comfort. And then the 24th is Christmas Eve and the 31st is New Year's Eve. So, let us now go to the Lord in prayer with thanksgiving and bring our hearts to the Lord. Father, we would never approach you or your word without your Holy Spirit attending us, abiding with us, filling us, filling your church, filling each heart. May we be humbled and thankful. and brought closer to Jesus who is our life, the bread of life. We thank you for him. This we pray in Christ's name. Amen. So my definition of crunch time is it's time to decide and there's no way out. If you remember those old Star Wars movies, you might remember when they were in that Garbage bin and the walls are closing in. They're about ready to get pancaked unless RTD, TDOO, or whatever he was, could turn off the computer. And that's how we are in this world. We have to make decisions. And even as Calvinists, we're not afraid of that word. We're going to talk about it a little bit and use it in an appropriate way, in a biblical and gospel way. We already saw it in Deuteronomy 30. We saw it in Joshua 24, our earlier readings today. There is a sense in which even the saints choose life and choose Christ. Now crunch time comes on everyone in this world and without any obscurity or ambiguity that it comes on everyone on the day of judgment except for those who are in Christ Jesus at that time the whole crunching of our sins the wrath of God has fallen on our substitute our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross and we are free from that burden. Now I've argued in the past and I still do stick to it even today and that is that every truly constituted Sunday church worship service by a faithful yet imperfect church like ours in itself renders for even the faithful and regenerate church members of the Ecclesia a type of crunch time, a time for us to every week re-evaluate where we are, to take a fresh look at what we're listening to, who we believe, what gospel we really hold on to, what are our values, and who are we really following and believing. And those things are really important, and in this text we see it in spades. Paul is really pouring it on. So crunch time, dears, is not just something we hold over the heads of people out in the world and threaten them with the Judgment Day. Crunch time is something that is for all of us to apply to our own hearts on a weekly basis. Sabbath Sunday-to-Sunday basis. Now in that light then, let's make it our gospel goal this Lord's Day to wisely choose Christ by God's grace alone, studying together 2 Corinthians 6.11-7.2. If you're new and you'd like to use the outline, we start here. The title of this sermon is Crunch Time. Every doctrine, or every text has a doctrine, and this is every Christian must decide whom and what to follow. Now notice the word must. We might not only say must, but we could also say invariably does decide whom and what to follow and believe. We all do. We're created that way. We're going to see that. This decision word we're using again in the Calvinistic sense, not in the Arminian one. This isn't a matter of free will as if we aren't affected by the fall. We all have free will to sin any way we want. We're talking about true freedom for regenerated saints. who now have a liberated will to actually cooperate with the grace of God in terms of sanctification and walking with Jesus. And that's an important thing that we should own. And we'll see that it's not just a doctrine or a convenient philosophy, it's a matter of life and death, making the right choice. Choose life. And today's text will make that clear. Indeed, it is true that every Christian must decide whom and what to follow. First, this is inevitable as we're creatures made in God's image. Now, being rational, created beings endowed with reasonable souls, we are by nature those who have to and do make moral and spiritual judgments about all kinds of things and people and doctrines and beliefs. and things we do and follow. It's inevitable, we do it. We do it instinctively. And essentially all the time in our rational minds, as we're actually cognizant of doing anything, we're always making judgments and determinations about everything. It's what we are in the created realm. But none of these decisions or determinations we make are made in or out of a vacuum. And children, I don't mean a vacuum cleaner, I mean a vacuum in the sense that there's no influence. All of our decisions are influenced by someone or something. Influences and influencers. And this will be the challenge that Paul lays before the Corinthians, and I think for us too, today, by the Holy Spirit's work through this text of Holy Scripture. So every so often in the holy book, the Lord gives his people, even his own children, a fresh opportunity to re-evaluate what we believe, who we believe, why we're believing it, how clearly are we believing it, are we really following it, who is our master, really? Not with the pretenses or the professions of being polite or saying the right thing, but who really is at the helm? And that's what we're going to get to here, Lord willing, today. And as God does that for us, he makes a way for us to retool our thinking, Lord stay to Lord stay, to become better theologians, more humble Christians, more thoughtful, honest Christians, Christians that are able and willing to indeed, as per our confession of faith, own our own sins, and not blame someone else, culture, neighbors, parents, whatever, pass the buck, none of that, no. Not even looking for the reason for sin in the world. but looking in our own hearts for what is needing to be dealt with. So we're going to be really candid and honest here as always. We should be. Don't be deceived, dears, don't be deceived. You and I are being guided by someone or something. Let's make sure ultimately it's the Good Shepherd who processes His ministry, monitors it through His under-shepherds brokers it through the influence of his appointed shepherds in the church and through the church to the Christian homes as well. Those are important and that's what we want to be appointing our hearts to today. Every Christian must decide whom and what to follow. This is inevitable as we are creatures made in God's image, and this is inevitable as we are volitional beings. V-O-L-I-T-I-O-N-A-L. Volitional. That has to do with will or choosing. We are endowed with that. And so that's what we are. The simple fact is we do things, don't we? We're not just blocks of wood, we actually act. All of us do. But the reason we act is based on our wills. We do what we do because we will to do what we will to do. The big question is, why do we do the things that we do? And for whose glory or good are we doing it? That becomes the real issue. Paul's dealing with it here in today's text. The Corinthian Christians would end up either choosing to follow Paul and the true apostles, or the false apostle Judaizers. And that's really what he's doing here in these verses. They're going to do one or the other. There is no way out. And this choice would be based in their wills. And again, here's where your gracious good theology, your Calvinistic reformed understanding of humanity, anthropology, sovereignty of God comes in, where we recognize that only the regenerated will is free to actually choose anything good. The unregenerated will freely chooses all kinds of things. They're all sinful, just a matter of how sinful, which one's more, which one they like the more. But the fact is that you have a liberated will, and this is something that Paul would tell the Corinthians, Are you in Christ? If you are, if you're truly regenerate, guess what? You're going to follow my teaching, Paul would say, the apostolic instruction, the Holy Scripture as it's brokered through us and understood and interpreted by us, Paul would say, You are going to do that, or if there are any unregenerate Christians among you in Corinth, he would say, you will probably go with the Judaizers because their way is a lot more alluring, tasty, and it does a lot for your flesh and makes you feel like you have something to do with your own salvation. And of course, sinners like that. So Paul is just laying it out. I think we have good cause to believe that in subsequent verses we see that the Corinthians on the whole, if not universally, made a very wise choice in their regenerated minds and hearts. And if any didn't, they either went with the Judaizers or just threw off all pretenses to the true faith and religion and church altogether. You know, when we're converted, we're given miraculous, supernatural, new wills. In fact, 2 Corinthians, the book we're studying, chapter 5, verse 17, says that we are new creatures in Christ. We are totally made over. We are not just reconstructed. We are new creatures in Christ. It's a beautiful thing. And this isn't just for the life to come. This is where we are right now. Now, having been made real new creatures, you might be saying, yes, but pastor, I still struggle a lot. I have problems and I sin and I have things happen that I don't like and I don't like the way I act sometimes and even the choices I make. Well, listen dears, that's part of the process. That's just part of being sanctified. The real challenge is for you to believe that you're still in Christ. If you're faithful in Christ and the covenant of the church, and you have that security, you can have it. But recognize that you want to grow in grace and knowledge of the Lord, you want to repent of sin, and to become more conformed to the image of Jesus, which is indeed our whole meaning and purpose for life here. Well, we've got a lot of verses, not a ton of time, so let's make good use of it. Looking at 2 Corinthians 6.11-7.2, and studying practical dynamics of crunch time. Now because this passage is long, we will of necessity be a bit spartan in some of our comments, but that's okay because Paul uses Old Testament citations and allusions in chapter 6, verses 16b through 18, which are largely illustrative and don't need to be fleshed out here. So let us now get right into some practical dynamics of crunch time. First, obligatory honor, verses 11 to 13 of chapter 6, we have spoken freely to you, Corinthians. Our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return, I speak as to children, widen your hearts also. Now please, I know that a lot of people are traveling last week, some sick. Last Sunday, in the earlier verses, we saw where in verses 4 to 10, Paul brings out the marks or the characteristics of authentic, genuine apostles. And that involves suffering, and good things, and hard things, and love, and perseverance, and endurance, and service, and all those things. He brought those out. Now, especially in verse 13, the great minister is very fittingly and very appropriately asking his Corinthian church members to do what would come naturally to true children, in verse 13a, and as well to quote, widen their hearts also, unquote, verse 13b. So he's just asking them, to, in a sanctified and right way, return the favor. Look, we've done this, please open your hearts, he says to them as well. Now, there is such a thing as obligatory honor. You know, all human beings are obliged to honor and glorify and love God, but no human being outside of Jesus Christ does that because we're all conceived in hatred for God and rebellion and total corruption. But there is an obligatory honor. But in fact, obligatory honor is never offered unwillingly by regenerated new creatures in Christ's Church. Every regenerated new creature in Christ's Church offers God willing obligatory honor. In fact, I would argue that no one in the entire history of the world has ever savingly honored even God unwillingly. Now, people honor God in every way. He's glorified all the time. It's not like God is unglorified at any moment. Everything that happens glorifies God. And people that reject Christ and end up in hell will glorify God there. But that's a negative glory. We're talking about a positive glory, something, an honor that we want to be part of. So the first item in ecclesiastical crunch time that Paul brings up here is a type of filial or family-related commitment. And as I mentioned earlier, in my opinion, I do think the Corinthians came around to do exactly what he instructs them to do here in this verse 13. So practical dynamics of crunch time, obligatory honor, and covenantal identification. Chapter 6, verses 14 through 18. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial, or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? for we are the temple of the living God as God said I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them and I will be their God and they shall be my people therefore go out from their midst and be separate from them says the Lord and touch no unclean thing then I will welcome you And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty." So, when not taken in context, verses 14 through 18 could look like they just fell out of the blue, out of sky, and just got inserted almost seemingly willy-nilly in the middle of this conversation that Paul's having with the Corinthians at the end of chapter or 6 verse 13, and then picking up at chapter 7 verse 2, which seemed to link. And some people have thought, well, this is an insertion. This is a late addition. This is a part of Pauline literature that got left out somewhere, and they just decided, hey, there's a nice spot in 2 Corinthians, let's just pop it in down there. But we don't believe that, because we believe and hold to an integrated, inspired, and ordered scripture. And we believe that these verses are right where they ought to be, and that the Holy Spirit intended them to be there. Now I've told you I think over the last couple of weeks that I used to be a little confused about it myself because it does seem to sort of break the flow. But then all of a sudden it hit me, I believe by the Holy Spirit, that, wait a minute, this has everything to do with what he's talking about. This isn't some new thing. This is the whole debate between the true apostles and the false ones. And now he's going to bring it home in some pretty Dogmatic language. So, if this is the case, that these verses belong where they are, and we believe they do, to what do they refer? How many times have you all heard, and we use it a lot, don't be unequally yoked, right? And usually we apply that in terms of people who are considering marriage, right? A Christian, non-Christian, not a very good situation, is it? Or maybe it's a business partnership or some other close association. And we take these verses and we apply them. Now, I think that's a legitimate thing to do, but it's a subordinate application. That's not what these verses are about. Paul isn't out of the blue telling the Corinthians, oh, if you're getting ready to get married, make sure you marry a fellow churchman or something like that. No, he's saying, don't be unequally yoked with unbelievers. And he's talking about the false apostle Judaizers. And now he starts playing hardball with them. He's calling them unbelievers, worshipers of Belial, idolaters. I mean, he gets tough here. But isn't that good? That's how serious doctrine really is. You'll always be tempted to move away from good doctrine. You'll never be tempted to move toward good doctrine. And this is always a struggle for all of us. So the identification comes in. With whom are you going to identify? Are you going to be with Christ or Belial? Are you going to be a believer or an unbeliever? Are you going to be one who worships in the temple of God or the temple of idols? Are you going to be a partner with righteousness or lawlessness? With light or darkness? He's playing hardball, dears, with the Judaizers. He truly is. What these verses really apply to more than anything is an attachment to covenant faith and faithfulness in the church, in Christ, with his doctrine, with his authentic apostles and later ministers, in the context of his loyal yet certainly imperfect militant church on earth. That's what he's telling them. Be faithful there. Reject the Judaizers. Cast them out. Don't touch the unclean thing. Have nothing to do with them. Now, dears, don't get me wrong. If you have friends that are considering marriage and one of them is a Christian and one's not, that's not a very good idea now, is it? And you might bring them to this verse. And it would be okay. But please understand that the real context is something even bigger than that. And that's this whole doctrine of whether we're going to be with Christ or Satan. So yes, he is playing hardball. And he uses some very unsavory expressions, as we've mentioned, in verses 14 to 16a and in verse 17. But there's some really gracious, lovely promises found for faithful churchmen, especially in verses 16b and 18. So if these verses, 14 to 18, do not convince us of the importance of sound Christ-honoring, gospel-laden doctrine, then I don't know what will do the trick. Practical dimension, dynamics of crunch time, obligatory honor, covenantal identification, and finally, sanctified determination, verse 1 and 2 of chapter 7. Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. Make room in our hearts for us, for we have wronged no one, we've corrupted no one, we've taken advantage of no one. Now the aforementioned promises are actually called that here in verse 1, so verse 1 you might think should be part of chapter 6, but that's okay. Chapter divisions are not inspired. Now Paul is giving the Corinthians here an opening to freshly enjoy the glories of Christ in his gospel through They're cleansing themselves of the Judaizers and their doctrine and clinging to Christ and the true gospel in the context of his church in Christ's likeness and growth and grace and knowledge of the Lord. That's what he's doing for them here. And then in verse 2, the Apostle Paul picks up on his theme of chapter 6, verse 13, which he had interluded with the words of 6.14-7.1. And then after this, he goes into a very interesting autobiographical, itinerary-laden discussion of his own experiences and his appreciation of the comfort of God and Titus coming, and then the good report of the Corinthians. And so we have good reason to believe that the Corinthians, by God's grace, made the wise choice, the gracious determination. So why is all this so important for us today? There's because we can never take anything for granted in the kingdom church of God. This is really part of the life of a faithful Christian. parishioner, deacon, ruling elder, teaching elder, it doesn't matter. All of us who are covenanted have to recognize we can't take anything for granted and we got to stay diligent, vigilant, prayerful, watchful, and careful. We can't really let up. As soon as we do, we're inviting trouble. Because there are a billion, zillion influencers out there just willing and waiting to give us their false gospel, and then we give them whatever we have left of ourselves to give away. But that is below you. You're created in the image of God and recreated in Christ, and you have a higher life esteem than that. You have an inheritance to enjoy in Jesus. At every turn, there are challenges to the true religion, the Reformed faith, the Spirit-filled church, the Westminster faith. There are challenges all the time. And this is the case not only for those whose professions turn out not to be sincere or salvific, who turn out to be hypocrites and liars and leave. It's also true that we in the church are afflicted with heretical assaults too, even for truly regenerate real Christians. Never forget that. You're not immune from it. It really does happen. It happened to them and it happens today. Well, let's do some more application this morning and comprehend. Why crunch time is healthy for the true children of God? And why would God, our loving, kind, gentle, tender, wonderful, sweet, heavenly Father, have any of us, the beloved and special objects of his greatest affection in Christ, reevaluate our spiritual conditions on a weekly Sunday-to-Sunday basis? Well, that's the question, by God's grace, we're going to seek to try to answer. Why crunch time is healthy for the true children of God? Because we need fresh, fresh pruning, which keeps us clean in Christ. Now, if you've got an outline there, you'll notice I put in John 15, 2 and 3, and that's very key in this regard. I'm going to quote those two verses. Jesus speaking, he says, Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he, the Father, takes away. And every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you." This is the practical dimension of covenant theology that people don't understand. He's talking about professing Christians baptized in the church that turn out to be authentic, i.e. sinful, regenerate, real Christians who persevere from week to week, and professing Christians in the church baptized who turn out to be unbelievers, never regenerate, never made new creatures, they're broken off, thrown out, burned in the fire. This is why there's our non-covenantal Baptist friends. We love them, but they can never figure out the Bible. Because these kind of verses tie them up. But for us, it's very practical. And all the dynamics found in verses 1 and 2 of John 15 are seen in today's scripture lesson. They're implicit there. The word of God is put out. All the Christians in the church hear it. The fruit will either be good, i.e. in harmony with the true apostles and the authentic gospel, or it will be bad, i.e. the rotten fruit of those who believe the false apostles and the cursed gospel of works and law and self. The gospel of the world. The gospel of all false religions. The confederacy of everything against the true church. of any strife. It's all about works in law, performance, what we do. As if we could actually do something to please God for justification, which is impossible. Christ did it all. Therefore, it is even good for us today to take renewed stock of our doctrine, our instructors, and our allegiances, and ask ourselves, what do we believe? And as we do that, we want to accord our hearts with the Holy Scripture, the Word of God, which has this cleansing effect on us that we saw in chapter 7, verse 1, in the aforementioned text of John 15, 3, and I might also add the lovely expressions found in Ephesians 5, 26. Now for you gardeners and horticulturalists out there, which doesn't include me by any means, you know that when you do the pruning, the hacking, we had it out here on the road every once in a while, we call it the Kickapoo Creek Massacre. They just wipe out those tree branches, get them off the wires down there. It looks terrible, right? It's gnarly, it's ugly, it looks bad. But guess what? If they did it the right time, they knew what they were doing, and they want it to happen, fruit will grow on it. Better fruit, better leaves, better trees, better branches, you know the thing. Pruning is not pretty, and being pruned is not a very pleasant experience, but in Christ we all need it. And if we are in Christ, we get it. So every time our hearts are moved, repenting, contrite, humble, broken, confessional, receptive, believing, kind, tender, generous, merciful, benevolent, good in any way. All this is is the fruit of the Holy Spirit because he's pruned you and now you're bearing fruit. as per Galatians 5, 22 and 23 which mentions many of those same fruit of the Holy Spirit. So why crunch time is healthy for the true children of God? Because we need fresh pruning which keeps us clean in Christ and because we would stray if we were not counted as sheep every Sunday. Do you know that that's true? Do you understand that? If you do, you're in a small minority among professing Christians in the United States and many other places that actually understand that's true. We need to be counted as sheep every Sunday. Ironically, I just saw one of our great servants here counting earlier today. Isn't that funny? It's not in my notes. We need to be counted as sheep as the good shepherd gets his flock together. And those few sheep that are sick or traveling, our hearts go out to them. We pray for them, don't we? We try to be aware of where they are. God's sheep must be accounted for every Sunday. This is one of the reasons church membership and the vows we make in church membership are so critically important. Now, to the Corinthian Christians' credit, let's give them the honor, they at least gathered on those Sunday mornings in the Peloponnesian area of Greece, didn't they? They had a lot of problems, we know that from 1 Corinthians. The real question would be, among them, who would side with Christ the Lord, Paul as apostle, the gospel of free and pure grace, and the Messiah's shed blood and resurrection? And who, if any, would go with the false apostle Judaizers in Satan's religion? That would be the question before them. Believe it or not, there's that, in a very real sense, is still largely the query before us even today, isn't it? Really is. Who will we follow? Who do we follow? Go ahead and try to answer that yourself, don't have to say anything. Crunch time, though, the Word of God working on the hearts of His true children, squeezes the truth out of us. Like smashing the end of a toothpaste thing, it comes out. Crunch time makes us have to face the unfamed truth. Let us believe in, love, follow, embrace, and gladly obey the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who shed his precious blood for us, who rose from the dead on our behalf, whose incarnation and birth we're celebrating, this great promise of Isaiah 9.6, a son would be given, a child. And let us gather around Him in the pasture of His sheepfold, His true and cherished church, as we are today on this Sabbath, and everyone as we're able. Well, the crunch time comes on everyone. But for us who are in Jesus, let us make sure that he is the very issue of our heart in crunch time. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for Christ, that he is indeed the one that Paul was addressing the Corinthians and us always to embrace. We thank you for him. We pray that We would be grateful for your sovereignty. We do know that none of your elect will be lost. We understand that. We know they'll persevere in the true church. We get that, too. But this does not relieve us of our responsibility of being faithful, because that's part of the whole providence and sovereignty of God. We thank you for it. In Jesus' name, amen.