The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III
© 2023, Dr. Tamilio
Christian singer, songwriter, and pianist Michael W. Smith has a song entitled “Purified.” It opens with these lines,
Where the angels see
You are praised as You should be
But how can I express
My yearning for Your Holiness
May it be
That I will open up my heart
Search me in the deepest part
And I will stand in cleansing fire
By You, purified
By You I’m purified
A beautiful, Pentecostal image: through the cleansing fire of the Holy Spirit, we are purified. Fire destroys, but it also cleanses. But what does “purify” really mean from a Christian perspective?
To be purified means to be made pure, to be made clean. If you consult the dictionary, it offers many definitions, among them are to remove contaminants from something (as in a filtration system) or to make ceremonially clean.
Christian theology makes it very clear. We are not clean. We are stained with sin, because we are all sinners. You do not hear that message much nowadays in mainline churches, but it is true. We are all sinners. Be it in thought, word, or deed, we have all fallen short of the glory that God intended for us. We are all broken. The first several chapters of the Bible make this clear, as do multiple passages in the New Testament. Genesis 6:12 reads, “all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.” In other words, this is our doing. We weren’t made to be this way. We used our free will to disobey God. As Gabriel Fackre claims, sin is our “no” to God’s “yes.” The Apostle Paul (in the New Testament) told the believers in Rome, “No one is righteous, no, not one” (3:10b). If you read that part of Romans further (chapter three), Paul continues to say that we are “worthless,” that our mouths are “open graves,” that we have “venom” on our lips, and our feet are “swift to shed blood.” It’s hard to make it clearer than that! In fact, if Paul were alive today preaching that message, I think he’d be canceled pretty quickly.
Maybe a more tangible way of thinking about what sin is and how it manifests itself in us is to look at the work of St. Anselm as interpreted by Millard J. Erickson in his Introduction to Christian Doctrine. Erickson writes that according to Anselm, “Sin is basically a failure to render God his due, taking from God what is rightfully his and dishonoring him.”[1] He continues, “We sinners must restore to God what we have taken from him.”[2]
But the irony is that we can’t restore anything to God! We are not able to. Fackre writes that sin “has to do with our fundamental disorientation.”[3] Disorientation is a good word. When you are disoriented, you literally do not know your right from your left. You stumble around aimlessly. Sin causes us to spiritually stumble around aimlessly. Hence, we need Jesus. Through his life and sacrifice, he restores us to God. He purifies us. He qualifies the unqualified and purifies the impure.
Today is Pentecost: the day that Jesus’ followers received the Holy Spirit — the day that the Church was born. Tongues of fire appeared over their heads as they gathered in Jerusalem. Again, this is a great image because fire purifies. It refines. Metal workers smelt metal — meaning that they literally put it in fire — to burn away any impurities. My uncle and cousin used to own a foundry in Salem. I used to watch in amazement at the large vat of liquid metal. It looked like lava. I once asked my Uncle Bob what would happen if I put my hand in there. He smiled and said, “Try it.” Suffice it to say, I didn’t.
The Holy Spirit enters our souls and does the same thing. It smelts the sin from our souls. Sinful though we are, that sin is wiped away (at least in God’s eyes), because of the Holy Spirit’s purifying work in our lives. If that isn’t good news, then I don’t know what is! Amen?
And there’s even more good news. This is where the grace and hope and love of the story unfolds in glorious hues. Your sinful nature does not define who you are. God created you out of love for a purpose: to love God and to be loved by God; to love others and to be loved by them. You are not defined by the wrongs you have done. That is not who you are. You are a child of God. Nothing you can do can forfeit that love. I always use my own children as an example. Even if they did something absolutely horrible, I would not stop loving them. I may be disappointed, I may want them to face justice (depending on what they do), but I will never not love them.
If I can feel that way, how much more does God feel that way about us? Rev. Marc Carr illustrates this quite nicely.[4] He uses Floyd Landis, a professional cyclist, as an example.
Floyd Landis was embroiled in a doping scandal after winning the 2006 Tour de France. He was raised a Mennonite in Pennsylvania and, maybe because of that, he leans on his mother for support. “She’s the one that no matter what happens, to me or to anyone else in life, she will remain unchanged,” he said. “When she spoke to me, she said, ‘Look, tell me the truth. It doesn’t matter to me what it is; I’ll see you the same regardless.’ And I think if you saw any of her interviews on television, she believes in me,” Landis said. She loves me unconditionally — faults and all.
God feels the same way about us. We are loved completely and unconditionally. What’s more, in the eyes of God we have been purified — purified by the blood of Christ, purified by the Pentecostal fire of the Holy Spirit.
As Christians, we need to strive to live lives that reflect that forgiveness. We need to strive to be the people that God intended us to be. We cannot remain in sin and simply say, “It’s okay because God forgives me.” If that were the case, we could run around doing the most heinous things and justify them saying, “God forgives me anyway, so I can do whatever I want.” That is an affront to God’s grace. We are to try to see ourselves (and one another) the way that God sees us. That is what it means to be purified — to strive to be pure. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructed the multitude “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). As I often say, we aren’t perfect and we never will be, but if we strive to be we will much further along then if we didn’t try.
And furthermore, trying to live a righteous life is the primary way that we thank God for the blessings he has already bestowed upon us; to thank him for the grace that he lavishly pours into our lives; to thank him for the cleaning fire of his love.
Where the angels see
You are praised as You should be
But how can I express
My yearning for Your Holiness
May it be
That I will open up my heart
Search me in the deepest part
And I will stand in cleansing fire
By You, purified
By You I’m purified
Amen.
[1] Millard J. Erickson, Introducing Christian Doctrine, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 279.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Gabriel Fackre, The Christian Story: A Narrative Interpretation of Basic Christian Doctrine, vol. 1, 3d ed. (Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), 77.
[4] The following is taken from Marc Carr, “Unconditional Love,” Sermon Central, August 7, 2006. It has been reworded slightly.