Well, good morning, crossing Church.
How are you today? Oh yeah, you're ready to go.
I'm glad to hear that. You know you at all of our
locations. Just take a moment and look at
the person next to you and just tell them, you know what, you
are beautiful on the inside 'cause you got the Holy Spirit.
Holy Spirit Makes You Beautiful on the inside.
I want to I want to welcome everyone that's joining us from
all various locations around this area.
If you're inside or online, we're especially thankful for
you. And man, I'm excited to be able
to share with you today. It's, it's been a great series,
hasn't it? When you get into the names of
God, you're just getting, it's like you're, you're cheating in
December and you found where mom and dad were hiding the presents
and, and you're, you're, you're seeing all these wonderful
things that that are coming your way or that are already there.
Maybe some of them are unwrapped and some of them are wrapped.
I mean, some of these you look at you think of the things that
God does for you and and maybe you've never really unwrapped
that in your own life. Maybe you've never let that a
bit become an experience in your own life.
But every time you unwrap one of these, man, it's incredible.
So we started out with Jehovah Rohi, the Lord, my shepherd.
He's my shepherd, Jehovah Nisi. The Lord is my banner.
Or you could say the Lord is my victory.
Jehovah Rapha, the Lord is my healer.
Last week I think it was Jehovah Shalom.
The Lord is my peace. Then we have Elroy, the God who
sees me, El Shaddai, the the God who nurtures me.
And if you spend some time like pushing down to those names of
God, what you're going to find out is that you have a role.
You have a role that you play in each one of these names.
So like, if the Lord is my shepherd, what does that make
you? A sheep, right?
Isn't that great that the Lord is my shepherd and and I'm not,
I'm considered the sheep. You know why?
Because that puts the bar really low.
Sheep aren't that intelligent, right?
And and they don't think about it.
So like God is God's giving us a whole lot of grace by saying
that and saying that the Lord is my shepherd.
I'm thankful for that. The Lord is my banner, my
victory. You know, that means that, yeah,
there are battles that we fight in this world, but he is my
victory. Like he's going to go out and
fight the battle. Wouldn't you rather have God
fight the battle for you than to have to fight the battle
yourself? The Lord is my healer, boy, I
can really use that. And it's not just from a
physical sense. I mean, it's an emotional thing.
It's a, it's a spiritual thing. It's a psychological thing
because in so many ways we are broken people.
And the Lord is my healer. You know, some people haven't
unwrapped that yet. They haven't figured out that
that's who he is and that's what he does.
The Lord is my peace, not in the absence of the storms of life or
the challenges or the crisis, but even in the middle of it.
The Lord is my peace. He's like Bass on freeze tag,
that one place where nobody gets to tag me.
Now I got he's, I'm with the Lord and I'm in the Lord.
He's my peace. That's a comfort, Elroy.
The God who sees me, that's one of them that's coming up.
You know, it's, it's not a good feeling to feel like you're
invisible, like nobody cares or nobody knows or that you're,
you're just, you know, you're just kind of out there, but
nobody has any investment in that.
And what God is saying is, no, you're not, you're not
invisible. I see you.
And then El Shaddai, the nurturing God.
That's going to be a fun sermon when that gets preached because
it's the only time at the name of God is in the female voice or
the female tense and and it it's the mothering aspect.
It's that you know, the image of God isn't just a male image of
God in the sit in this sense. I mean male and female are
created in God's image. It says that in Genesis 1, and
this idea of nurturing and caring for, that's an attribute
of God, that that that instinctive motherly reality,
because so many times in our lives we need that.
We just need to be held. We just need to be encouraged.
We just need to feel the presence of the arms of God
around us, protecting us and being with us regardless of our
circumstance. We need that nurturing God.
But if you'll stop with me for a second, you'll see a common
thread. All of these attributes that God
is providing or being for me is Him doing the work.
It's Him doing all of that for me.
And those are incredible. I think those are incredible
blessings for sure. But the one that I'm preaching
today is different. The name of God that I'm going
to be talking about is Jehovah Mechadesh.
Jehovah Mechadesh. I have never preached on this
name of God in 4550, however long I've been doing this, I
have never preached on this name of God.
It only appears one time in the whole Bible, and it appears in
the one book of the Bible that we read the least, the book of
Leviticus. How many of you are like, you
know, I am in Leviticus and it is changing my life.
I am just it just, yeah, maybe not so much.
So is a very obscure name. And this is what this name
means. Jehovah Mechadesh.
I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
Well, that sounds pretty great. Wow, that's great.
That's another thing that God is giving me at first glance
anyway. If I understand what the word
sanctifies means, you feel like you're getting a gift, but I
dare you to take a little bit of a closer look into this word.
And, and so we need to just do that.
Just drill down into what the word sanctifies means the best
definition of this, of this word is to be set apart for a holy
purpose. That's probably the most
complete definition of that word to be set apart for a holy
purpose. Now the set apart part of that
definition, we have another word for another Bible word for that
you're a lot more familiar with, and that word is holy.
Holy or holiness. Now it's a word.
That word holiness is a word that's used to describe God
specifically and how he is set apart for not everything else,
but from us, how he is set apart from us.
We like to think about God being close to us, but the word Holy,
See, I think holy is one of the most mystifying words in the
Bible. People don't understand what it
means. They think that holy means pure
or righteous. I mean, there's an aspect of it
to that, but but that's not really what it means.
It means to be separated. It means to be other than how He
is set apart, particularly from us.
Why? Because He is good by his
definition of good, which we don't even begin to understand,
He is so good and we realize, at least in a rudimentary way, that
we're not good. Not like God would define good.
All the other names of God I am 100% good about.
I'm I'm cool with them because they all point to God.
They, they all point to all the things he defines himself to be.
But this one is different. This one is set apart from the
others because it is the one who It's the name of God.
That isn't just defining God, it's defining me.
I am the God who sanctifies you. It's an action that God is doing
in my direction. That being said, I'm going to be
really transparent with you. This is the hardest name of God
in in my world in my life for me to believe in.
I don't want to believe in this. I don't want to believe in this
and I'll tell you why because I know me.
I'm an expert at me and you're an expert at you, right?
So when the Bible says I am the Lord who sanctifies you, and I'm
hearing that personally, hey, Jerry, I am the Lord who
sanctifies you. And I'm like, yeah, right.
I know me. And I got a problem with that
because if that is actually the truth, it's certainly hard to
see. And you could describe me or I
could describe myself in a lot of ways.
But if you know my past and my present and the probability of
my future, it would lead you to a lot of places, but it would
not lead you anywhere near this word.
Oh, that Jerry, he's sanctified. And I don't think it would lead
you there either. I have a hard time believing
this word because I have a hard time believing that I am
sanctified or could ever be sanctified.
Now I'm going to ask a transparency question.
How many of you are in the same boat that I'm in?
How many people am I preaching to today?
I mean, don't you have a hard time believing that I started
dating Allison when she was 15 1/2 and I was 18.
Yep. Cradle robber right here.
And hey, OK, not even going there.
We dated. We were, we dated for, I don't
know, a year, year and a half. And Allison's parents did not
like me. They did not like me at all.
And I can't understand that. I'm a lot.
I'm a likable guy. They didn't like me and they
decided that we were going to have to break up.
So we did because that's what her parents said we had to do.
So I'm trying to fill this void in my life because I really had
deep feelings up for Allison. And, and so I started, I started
the whole girlfriend shopping thing.
And, and I actually, I actually had a list and, and, and whoever
I dated had to have had to meet all the criteria this list.
And I mean, it was a it was, I mean, I think that got so dumb.
But, you know, she had to be a certain height because of
dancing, hair color, eye color, just general looks.
Intelligence, National Honor Society.
Yeah, and had to be that deep, deep faith.
A lot of a lot of different things.
OK, I found that girl. I found her name was Rachel.
And and I remember when I took her out the first time and she
invited me into her house, I'm like, dude, I'm out of my
league. I really thought, oh, wow.
You know, she's Allison knows I'm telling the story.
By the way, she was up on stage a little earlier and I remember
going to church with her. Now we had a we had a deal.
She was a Nazarene. How many of you know Nazarenes?
Yeah, she was a Nazarene. She was the head of her youth
group, all that stuff. And she was a liberal Nazarene.
So what is a liberal Nazarene? Well, conservative Nazarenes,
the girls, women don't cut their head.
They they don't cut their hair. They put them up, they don't
wear any makeup, they don't wear jewelry.
Well, she's a liberal Nazarene because she cut her hair and she
wore makeup and she wore jewelry and all that stuff, you know.
And so we go to the church. And so our, our habit was we
would go to her church on Sunday morning.
We go to my church on Sunday evening.
So we would go twice on Sunday and I was there and I'm
listening to the sermon and I'm listening to the preacher and
the and the sermon was on sanctification.
Now, in the Nazarene church, they define set sanctification
as a second act of grace. So like the first first act of
grace is salvation. The second act of grace is
sanctification in the Nazarene church.
OK, I don't know what that means.
Right. And then this guy's preaching,
and I'm listening to him preaching, and this is what he's
saying. He's saying something about
being sanctified means you don't sin anymore.
At least that's what I heard. Now I'm an 8 on the Enneagram
scale, which means I'm a challenger.
And so I listened to things critically like that.
So sermons over, I'm kind of scratching my head.
I'm walking with Rachel to the car, and I go, so this was a
sermon on sanctification. She goes, yeah.
And I said, and he says sanctification is the second act
of grace. And she said, yeah.
And I said, and I thought, I really thought I heard him say
that when you're sanctified, you don't sin anymore.
And I'm looking at it. And she goes, yeah.
So this is my 8 coming out. Ready.
So I go. Rachel, are you sanctified?
And she went, Yeah. And I went.
You liar. You're a total liar.
You are not. I'll tell you.
Do you remember it's Sunday? On Friday, we, we just, we were
going to go out. You knew where we were going.
I knew where we were going. And we told your mom and dad you
were going somewhere else because they wouldn't have been
OK with where you were going. Do you remember that?
That was Friday. You lied to your parents.
You aren't sanctified. She starts crying.
If I would have been a preacher at the time, I would have had an
invitation song and she would have to come forward.
That relationship didn't last much longer.
I'm just telling you. And by the way, I am so glad.
I am so glad because God, he loves his dumb children and and
I, I got to I, I, I got the the very best when I got Allison.
Oh, my gosh, yeah. Praise God for her.
Yeah. So I think that this is a
misunderstood word because sanctification and holiness
escapes us. So what I'd like for us to do is
go to the Bible to get a better understanding of what this
actually means. OK.
And I think an incredible scripture for this is in the Old
Testament. It's in the book of Isaiah,
chapter 6. And we're going to start with
verses one through 4. Now I'm going to read this for
you, and then we'll take it apart.
Ready. In the year that king Uzziah
died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne, and
the train of his robe filled the temple.
Above him there were seraphim. It's a type of Angel, OK,
Seraphim. Each with six wings.
With two wings they covered their faces, with two they
covered their feet. And with two they were flying
and they were calling to one another.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
And at the sound of their voices, the doorposts and
threshold shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
Now think about what I just read to you.
God is so holy that he created a specific type of Angel called
the Seraphim that has three pairs of wings and it only takes
one pair to fly. The other two pair of wings are
for what 1 is for covering their faces.
Do you know why they cover their face?
Because God is so holy they cannot look at Him.
They cover their feet. Do you know why?
Because God is so holy they can't stand in His presence.
And these are angels that have never fallen because of sin, and
God has created him this way so that even in this state of what
I would understand is perfection, he is still holy to
them. So holy in fact, that they never
stop saying holy. Holy, which is like separate,
separate, separate is the Lord Almighty.
The whole earth is full of his glory and it uses the Lord
Almighty, which means the Lord of hosts or the Lord of the
armies of heaven. OK, where do I fit into this
picture? Well, that's the point.
I don't, you don't. Who does?
Now Isaiah is a prophet. But he's also a human being,
just like you and me, and he finds himself in this scene in
Isaiah 6. And what is his response to it
when he sees this awesome thing, verses 5 to 8?
Woe to me, I cried. I am ruined, for I am a man of
unclean lips, and I live among the people of unclean lips.
And my eyes have seen the king, the Lord Almighty.
And one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand,
which he had taken with tongs from the altar.
And with it he touched my mouth and said, See, this has touched
your lips, your guilt is taken away, your sin is atoned for.
And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send,
and who will go for us? And I said, Here am I, send me.
He recognizes it immediately. A prophet is defined by what he
says. He delivers the message of God
to the people. That's what a prophet does,
right? And so immediately he goes to
this definition of himself. He said, as I define myself in
the presence of Almighty God and His Holiness, I am a man of
unclean lips. I mean, that's the essence of
his identity as a prophet. Whatever comes out of his mouth,
whatever proceeds forth from his lips, the prophecies of God, I'm
unclean. I have no right to speak.
It's it's game over. He stumbled into the wrong place
and now there's going to be hell to pay except for what God does.
You see what God does. He initiates the symbolic
gesture to help Isaiah understand that he could do what
Isaiah could never do on his own, to set Isaiah apart for a
holy purpose. That lone passage in Leviticus
chapter 21, verse eight, I am the Lord who sanctifies you, is
doing the same thing. It's defining the priesthood as
part of God's divine plan. The the the priesthood of the
Levites and Aaron. The same thing he does with each
one of us. What the same thing he does with
each one of us. Because the Bible says that he
has through Christ, He has made us to be a Kingdom of priests.
Just like the priests of the Old Testament set apart for a holy
purpose. So you are set apart from a for
a holy purpose. And how how is that done?
Well, priests had the ceremonially washed.
This is all that in the Leviticus 21.
They had to wear special attire. They had to be sprinkled with
blood to serve in the Tabernacle.
Isaiah had to have a hot coal touches lips by a seraphim.
But what about us? Well lips, have we confessed
Christ with our mouth? I believe that Jesus is the
Christ and the Son of the living God, and I want him as my Lord
and my Savior. Have I been ceremonially washed?
Yes, I have. Do you remember when the apostle
Paul was talking about, when he was having a conversation with
Ananias about the idea of faith in God, and he said, now arise.
This is what Ananias said to Saul, who became Paul.
Now arise and be baptized, washing away your sins, calling
on the name of the Lord. Yeah, that means ceremonial
wash. And I have to be sprinkled with,
but there has to be blood applied.
Where's that happened? Well, where did Jesus die?
He died on a cross on Calvary, right?
2000 years ago in Jerusalem, right outside the city walls,
right? That's where he shed his blood.
His blood was shed in his death, right?
And in Romans 6 it says that we have been united with him in the
likeness of his death through baptism.
And even just as Jesus was raised to the glory of the
Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.
So a person who gets baptized in water is dying with Christ.
They're being buried with Christ and raised to walk in newness of
life, and they're coming in contact in a spiritual sense
with the very place that Jesus shed His blood, coming in
contact with the blood of Christ in that moment, not being
sprinkled with it, being immersed with it.
Isaiah chapter 118, same prophet, the 1st chapter of his
book. He says this in verse 118.
Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord.
Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as
snow. Though they are red as Crimson,
they shall be like wool. The Hebrew writer in Chapter 9,
verse 22 says this. In fact, the law requires that
nearly everything be cleansed with blood.
Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.
Revelation Chapter 7, verse 14 John, the writer of Revelation
says, and he said, these are they who have come out of great
tribulation. They have washed their robes and
made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
This is my sanctification. Jesus is my sanctification.
More specifically, the blood of Jesus is my sanctification.
I don't accept it. Listen to me.
I don't accept it because I see evidence of it in my life or in
the lives of others. I accept it because He says it.
And because He says it, that makes it true.
Yeah, I may not want to believe it.
You may not want to believe it. It doesn't matter what you
believe. What matters here is that he
says it's enough that he says it, that makes it true.
These other names of God are giving you the blessing of
telling you what God does for you.
But this one is telling you what God does to you.
He always initiates. I only respond.
You see, God doesn't just see me as I am.
He sees me with all of my possibilities becoming my
realities. The scripture says that He sees
us as presently seated with Him in the heavenly realms.
How can that be? Because He's greater than time.
He can see us this way. And what we have to do is trust
in that reality. Now, there's a deeper
understanding I want you to get, and this will be a little bit
hurtful to hear. You see, when I hear all these
names of God, I want to receive from God.
I want to receive all these blessings from God while staying
the same. I want all this, but I still
want to be who I am and I want to do what I do, and I don't
really want anybody to change me.
I would just love to have all of these things added to me.
But Jehovah Mekhadesh is going to change me.
He's going to make me different. In Jeremiah chapter 18 verses 2
to 6, that great prophet said this go down to the Potter's
house and there I will give you my message.
So I, Jeremiah, went down to the Potter's house and I saw him
working at the wheel, but the pot he was shaping from the clay
was marred in his hands. So the Potter formed it into
another pot, shaping it as bad as seemed best to him.
Then the word of the Lord came to me and he said, Can I not do
with you, Israel, as this Potter does, declares the Lord like
clay in the hand of the Potter. So are you in my hand, Israel?
Now I need to be done with this sermon, but I'm just not.
I'm not done yet. You see, there's a word that
appears before each of these descriptive words.
Regardless of you saying Shalom or you're you're saying peace or
you're saying banner or victory or whatever, there's a word that
appears before it. And the word that appears before
it is Jehovah, right? Bible scholars call that word
the Tetragrammaton. It's called the Tetragrammaton
because it comes from 4 Hebrew letters.
YHWHA lot of times you've heard the name of God as Yahweh.
YHWH. Ancient Hebrews, when they were
copying the Bible, would only use a special pen, a special
stylist, just to you, just to put that name in your Bible.
A lot of times the name of the Lord is capital L little Ord.
But every time the Tetragrammaton appears, YHWH,
it's all four capital letters. You know why?
Because it's the name that God gave himself.
Moses, 80 years old, standing in the presence of God barefoot,
and God was speaking to him out of a burning Bush and Moses
asked him his name and he said Yahweh, I am that I am.
I am the self existent one. I exist alone.
This is what that means in the Bible.
It's always used with those four capital letters and it's
translated this way. I am the Lord who is your
shepherd. I am the Lord who is your peace.
I am the Lord who is your banner.
Or in today's topic, I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
I want to drill down on that. I I am the Lord.
This is the self identified God. This is Creator, Sustainer,
Adam's breath, Enoch's transporter, the world's judge
in the flood, his bow in the sky after the rain, the power in
Moses staff, the accuracy of David Stone, the power that
overshadowed Mary, the man who walked among us, who taught us,
who fed us, who loved us, who was beaten for us, who died for
us, who rose again for us and is coming back for us.
I am the Lord. I am the Lord.
This is the God of the ages right now, present tense, who
always was, is, and always will be, who is before all things and
above all things, and the Ancient of Days and the
Everlasting Father. I am the Lord.
This is the only God. Not the Sumerian gods or the
Egyptian gods or the Greek gods or the Roman gods or Allah or
Buddha or Confucius or any other idol that you might want to bow
down to today, including yourself.
He is the God. I am the Lord and He is.
I am the Lord. This is his station, the self
existent, 1 sovereign, all powerful, all knowing, ever
present, infinite absolute ruler.
Why can you be sanctified? Because he says so.
Because the fact that He says it makes it true.
Listen to me. There is a difference when you
say his name and when he says his name.
There is a difference between when you say his name and when
he says his name and when he says I am the Lord who
sanctifies you. It's true.
We're moving to a time of decision.
You know, there's a lot of things that God says about us
and as we grow in our relationship to him, we he
reveals more and more to us. I don't know that that really
makes us better Christians because I think the best
Christians are the most ignorant ones in some ways.
Because he said, you know, you have to become like a little
child to inherit the Kingdom of God.
And that's why I have a problem with this name.
I have a problem with this name because, you know, I'm kind of
critically analyzing my own life and I'm and I'm putting it next
to what God says I am. And I'm, I'm really overthinking
it. What if I were a child?
I would just go, oh, yeah, OK. Just you did that.
OK, Just believe him, right? Very quickly last, maybe it was
a couple weeks ago, I don't know, but John was telling the
story, John Mitchell was telling the story about his son getting
in trouble and he was home and he got, John got a phone call,
your son's in trouble. And and then he went, went home
to do what he does as a father, what we all do as parents.
And what he said in that was he, you know, my son knew he was, he
was upstairs. He knew he's in trouble and I
stopped right there and I thought about that phrase and
you know what a kid does being in trouble means you got caught
and and your parent is going to get you right.
Was that true? Not at all.
The trouble was come when he being in trouble meant that he
had done something he shouldn't have done or, you know, or you
could be failing to do something you should have done and that he
had created the context of that trouble in his life.
He, it was there. What was his father doing?
His father was coming home, not to punish him, but to help him
through the trouble. When we get in trouble, that's
us. Isn't it interesting how we
always want to take the authority and put the weight of
it on the authority? Like, Oh yeah, I'm in trouble
because Dad's coming home or, or spiritually I'm in trouble
because I did something God didn't want me to do, so God's
going to get me because I'm in trouble, right?
When what is the truth? The truth is God's the only one
who gets you through the trouble.
He sees the trouble. He knows that he didn't 'cause
it. He's not responsible for it.
You did that right? But you know what God's going to
do. He's going to get you through it
because He loves you. And sometimes getting through
trouble is hard, but that's how you get through it.
Not God's trouble, our trouble. So listen to me.
I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
Some of you have never accepted Jesus Christ as the Lord and
Savior of your life. And God sent him to shed his
blood, to sanctify you, to rise from the dead, to sanctify you.
And until you accept that, you're going to be outside of
what God wants you to be, not just for now, but for all
eternity. And there's going to be somebody
standing right over there by that baptistry that would love
nothing more than to walk you through what it means to come
into relationship with Jesus Christ.
Many of you have made a decision for Christ, and these steps are
going to be open for you to come up.
And do you know what I want you to be thinking about?
If in fact it's true, and it is that you, if you have Jesus
Christ in your heart and the Holy Spirit dwells within you,
you have been sanctified by Him. And the reason it's hard to
believe it is because of the stuff that's in our lives maybe.
And just because you're a believer doesn't mean you're not
still dealing with things. Maybe you come up here and you
get down on your knees before your heavenly Father and you
said and you say to him, help me to remember that because of what
Jesus did, it was enough. It was enough.
Friend of mine wrote lyrics a long time ago.
Lord, I see so much in me that I just can't get right, things
that steal my sleep and keep me awake at night.
In your word I read about a peace I wish I felt.
But how can you forgive me when I can't forgive myself?
And the Lord answering answers him, saying it was enough, the
blood that I shed, it was enough that I rose from the dead, it
was enough. Nothing more you could do.
It was enough that I died for you.
Maybe today is a day for you to remember that before your
father, Would you stand with me? Let's pray together in Jesus
name. Heavenly Father, would you
please take this moment, this sacred moment, and help us,
Father, to realize that we can have confidence before you.
Even though you're such a holy God, you still see us as your
children. And you say in your word that we
can have confidence to approach your throne where the Seraphim
have to hide their faces and feet.
We can have confidence to approach your throne because of
Jesus. Help us to do that now.
I pray in Jesus name, Amen.