Equipped to be Holy

Equipped to Be Holy

Text: Romans 8:5-9

Intro.

When you think of a saint, what kind of person comes to your mind? To the average person on the street, a saint is someone who has been dead a long time. It’s someone whose memory has been kept alive by legends and pale paintings and plaster statues. They picture a person walking around in brown bathrobes and speaking in a soft hushed voice and who lives in monasteries and convents. Or they are living with lepers and feeding starving children in third world countries.

But most of the saints of this world aren’t like that at all. Most saints are normal people who are working everyday trying to overcome the downward pull of the worldly influences that are all around us.

Saints are God’s people. They have strong convictions, their motives are pure and their actions and lifestyle advertise their relationship with Jesus Christ. God’s saint of today may wear overalls... or an executives suit... or work boots... or medical scrubs... or maybe even the latest in teen fashions.

The truth is, we can all be saints. Saints are simply people who have made a lifetime surrender to God’s will and have been filled by the Holy Spirit. And because of that surrender and infilling, they are equipped by God to live the Holy Life in a very ungodly world.

There are countless examples given throughout history of men and women whom God has equipped to successfully live the victorious life of faith. The saints of the past testify to the fact that the Holy Spirit empowered them to do what they did. Their way of saying it may be different than how we would say it today, but the message is the same. For more than 2000 years, God has continued to fill people with the power of the Holy Spirit, and there is no shortage of the Spirits power. We aren’t running out of it, in fact we have an ample supply.

Some people ask, “Why do we need to be filled with the Spirit?”

I. We need to be Filled with the Spirit because the Holy Spirit Equips us to live the Holy Life.

When we talk about the Holy Spirit Equipping us, we are talking about “Sanctification”. The words “Equipped” and “Sanctified” are somewhat interchangeable. When we are “Entirely Sanctified”, we are “Entirely Equipped” to live the Christian Life. When we say we are “Sanctified Wholly” W-H-O-L-L-Y... we are “Wholly or Completely Equipped”

Some people have asked me, “Can’t I be a Christian without being “Sanctified Wholly?”
My answer to that is: How in the world can you expect to be a Christian without the help of the Holy Spirit? We cannot live the Christian life on our own strength and power. Trying to live a Christian Life without the infilling power of the Holy Spirit is like asking a carpenter to go build a house without any tools, or at best with only a few tools.

I have watched some of the men in the church, who are carpenters and builders and handy men, work. When they show up on the jobsite to do a job they’ve got TOOLS. They have every tool they know they’re going to need to do that job. They also has every tool they THINK they might need. They also have a lot of tools that they probably won’t need, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Why do they have so many tools? Because they like to show them off??? NO! They have all those tools because they want to be ENTIRELY EQUIPPED to do the job at hand.

That is