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Haggai - Stay Pure
Brian Mashburn
February 11, 2018
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Purifying And Staying Pure
Have you ever pondered words that appear to be so strictly religious that they never get used anywhere except in reference to the Bible or Christianity? Words like "salvation" or "redemption" or "repentance" seem to be so exclusively "churchy" that they don’t interface easily to real, practical life.
Holiness is one of those words. When something is holy, it is "set apart" from the rest of the world as a reflection or representation of God. And if that thing becomes contaminated by the world in some way, it is then considered unclean or impure (two more churchy words).
We turn in our study of the book of Haggai to a portion of text where it asks us to concern ourselves with this. It requires that we do the work of understanding how holiness and purity actually do connect to real life. Specifically, it asks us to consider if purity is contagious, and if impurity is contagious.
In other words, as Dwight Moody famously asked, when you put on your gloves and get to work in the garden, do your gloves get dirty, or does the dirt get "glovey"?
Today we consider our lives through the lens of purity and holiness. We go deeper into not just our actions, but our hearts, and we ask, are we being holy? We ask, how much, if any, impurity can I engage with and remain holy? We ask if it is possible that as I engage in holy and pure things, does that cleanse me from the unholy and impure things?
These are confronting questions that, for most, are fraught with enough fear, from perceived theological danger and potential life altering inconvenience, that even most Christians neglect to ask. Today, we will.