Renewing the Covenant: Resolution

Psalm 119:11
Don Garlington | Friday, November 15, 1996
Copyright © 1996, Don Garlington

There is an old gospel song which says, “I am resolved no longer to linger, charmed by the world’s delight; Things that are higher, things that are nobler, these have allured my sight. I am resolved to go to the Savior, leaving my sin and strife; He is the true One, he is the just One, he hath the words of life. I am resolved to enter the kingdom, leaving the paths of sin; Friends may oppose me, foes may beset me, still I will enter in.” It is not a very sophisticated old song with its rather raucous sort of tune and all of that, but it is theologically and devotionally as sound as it can be.

We are speaking about renewing the covenant, and we have already spoken of the role of confession and how the covenant relationship is renewed when it is broken from time to time. We have said that the covenant is basically a family bond, and that in order to maintain that family bond, we must talk not only to one another, but, supremely, to our Father who is the head of this covenant household. Worldly Resolutions

In this study we want to focus upon the matter of resolution. What do we mean by resolution? We are all familiar with the resolutions we make at the beginning of each new year. Those of us who are metabolically challenged, for example, want to resolve that issue, so we declare that this year we are going to lose the weight for sure. All the smokers will say, “Beginning on, well, maybe not the first of January, but the second anyway, I am going to stop. I am really going to quit this year.” Those of us who have had trouble saving money say, “Well, this year I am going to get a grip upon my spendthrift ways.” Whatever the resolutions are, the world makes them every year. And you know the story: we stick with it for two or three days, or in some cases maybe a week, but that is it. The resolutions go kaput. The smokers go back to puffing away, the metabolically challenged go back to eating however they ate before, and no one gives it any more thought.

In many cases these worldly resolutions have an unreality about them. Why? They are unreal because we cannot separate the past from the future. What I am going to be in the coming year is related to what I have been this year and what I have been in years past. I cannot become overnight something that I have not been before. There is such a continuity in life that we cannot simply snap our fingers one day and become something that we were not the day before. Another problem with the world’s resolutions is that the true nature of humankind is not brought into consideration. The world has no sense, or, indeed, no idea that there is such a thing as indwelling sin living as an enemy within us. Thus, there is no dependence on a higher power for help. These are two reasons the world’s resolutions are unrealistic.

Besides being unrealistic, these resolutions display an underlying philosophy that we are the captains of our souls and the masters of our fate, that we can pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, and that we can do anything. This is all self-reliance, and indeed, all of these resolutions terminate upon self. Now there are people who engage in self-improvement, and they, indeed, are better than they were, say, a few months before when they began upon the road of their new resolution. But even with all the gains that are made, such activities terminate on self and never go beyond self.

Christian Resolution

In contrast to worldly resolutions, the Christian’s resolutions, at least ideally, avoid the above pitfalls. They are realistic, they are made in dependence on God, and their aim is to glorify God in sanctification. Those are the great differences between a Christian’s resolutions and those of the world. All the resolve of the world terminates on self–self-improvement and self-glorification. But for the Christian, the aim and bottom line of everything is to glorify Christ and be shaped into his image so that God would be glorified and honored in the individual’s sanctification. The motivation is entirely different from the world’s.

Christians’ resolutions are grounded in their union with Christ, the risen Lord. This is not self-improvement in the sense of the modern infomercial. It is not listening to some self-help speaker and buying his tapes. Someone has said that what self-help teachers are doing is selling themselves, and I think that is true. It is all upbeat and touchy-feely speech: “You can do it! You can get your black belt in karate just like I have my black belt. You can be a helicopter pilot. You can own your own island in the South Pacific somewhere. You can own half of Tahiti if you just set your mind to it.” But, you see, all that terminates upon self. What we are talking about is the product of Christ and the believer. We are talking about the extension of Christ himself in the believer. Christians must realize that Christ is the lover of their souls, and as we fall deeper and deeper in love with him, then the various issues we have to deal with in our Christian lives are taken care of ipso facto –they are the byproduct of the love of Christ for his people and our love for him. Christ actually lives out his life in us. Do you remember how Paul says that there is such a thing as filling up the sufferings of Christ? Christ does that in the person of his church.

Jesus Christ is not finished with living his life of righteousness; rather, he is living that life in and through his people. Now, I am not advocating something like “Let go and let God,” wherein we simply become the funnel through which the divine energy flows or anything as mystical as that. I am just saying that there is such a thing as the body of Christ, and that Christ is not through with the work of redemption in the ultimate sense because he is the process of shaping us into his own likeness. And so our resolutions are grounded in our union with Christ. Ideally, they avoid the pitfalls of the world’s resolutions. And I want to add to this that in this whole process that resolution is indispensable in the path of godliness. If there is no resolve, there will be no growth.

Now I think the heart of Puritanism in any age is this resolution. In Psalm 119 David says we are to hide God’s word in our hearts so that we do not sin against him. The problem is that traditionally that has been perceived as being all resolution and nothing else–just gritting the teeth, grinning and bearing, simply getting a hold of yourself in terms of a regimented lifestyle and diet, or whatever it may be–and that is the sum and total of Christianity. I am going to do this if it kills me. This is hardly the way that one addresses one’s lover, is it? And that is what Christ is. But the heart and the essence of Puritanism–I would call it biblical Puritanism–nevertheless, is this resolution not to sin.

Resolving Not to Sin

In our text, Psalm 119:11, David first states the methodology of making good his resolution, “I have hidden your word in my heart,” and, second, he states the resolution, “that I might not sin against you.” I would like to approach this verse in the opposite order and consider David’s resolution first.

By this determination, David, representing all believers, displays the very heart of Christianity in its attitude towards sin. We might like to say that the believer is almost preoccupied with sin–not entirely, because his foremost preoccupation is Christ–but there is this attitude of sin. We may ask the question, “What is a Christian?” and you can give may answers to that question, but for our purposes in this discussion the answer we give is that a Christian is the one who has a certain concern about his sin, a certain resolve with regard to sin, and a continuing consciousness and cognizance that there is such a thing as sin.

I think we have to agree with old Alexander Whyte of Edinburgh, a Scottish preacher of the last century on this point. There were some people in his day who wanted get out of Romans 7 and go into Romans 8, where it was all life and liberty in the Spirit, and not have anything to do with the struggle of Romans 7. Whyte looked out over them one day from his pulpit and he said, “As long as I am your minister, you will be in the seventh of Romans.” As long as indwelling sin is a reality, there must be a resolution to deal with the entity called indwelling sin.

If you are a Christian, think about your conversion. Many things happened at that time, but central to the conversion process was the realization that aspects of your behavior were not what they should have been. You realized that you are not simply an animal, which can act as it pleases without any restraints, but rather, that as a human, all aspects of your behavior are to be placed in the context of humankind. And in that realization you would have acknowledged that there were certain things wrong and you were a sinner.

Suppose you went back and talked to your old pals after you had been a Christian for a while. When you told them you had become a Christian, and that in the process you came to understand that there is such a thing as sin, perhaps they said to you, “Oh, come on, now. You know, you are not nearly as bad as these other people we see.” But you were not swayed by them, because as a Christian you came to understand that Jesus Christ died for the very specific purpose of delivering us from sin–not sin in the abstract, but sin in the concrete. And so by David’s resolve “that I might not sin against thee,” we are taken to the very heart of Christianity, to the very core of biblical religion. We are those who are concerned about our sins and never get over a sense of it.

A Sense of Sin

We fail a lot, do we not? We may fail as students, as employers or employees, as parents or as children. But our greatest failure is our sin. And our sin is the greatest cause of God’s restraint of his blessing upon us. Did you realize that as individuals and churches,we could know more of the blessing of God? As any good parent, God restrains his blessing when we sin. He never stops loving us, but sometimes the expression of this love takes on a rather unpleasant aspect.We can, in other words, experience a pat on the head or a smack on the bottom. In either case, God loves his people, and yet sometimes he withholds blessing because sometimes their sense of sin tends to get away from them.

The heart of my Christianity is displayed by our attitude towards sin and toward the God against whom we have sinned. Now, we know that ungodly people are often sorry for the past. But are they sorry for their wrongdoing? No. They are sorry that they got caught. A man may commit adultery and contract something like AIDS and pass that on to his wife and to others. If he is caught, he might become extremely sorry, but he really could not have cared less otherwise. Only the dreadful consequence causes him to be sorry at all.

How much different is the Christian’s attitude! You see, we are sorry that we have dishonored the God of creation and grace. We are sorry, not that we got caught, but rather, that the honor of the Christ who died for us has been besmirched in our families, in our churches, and in our society by our sin.

The Sins of Christians

Have you ever read Arnold Dallimore’s biography of George Whitefield? There is a note in which he refers to Howell Harris, who was the evangelist in Wales during the eighteenth century awakening. Quoting from the diary of Howell Harris, Dallimore relates how Harris once spoke of going to London and hearing Charles Wesley preach on the sins of Christians. Harris said, “On his showing how dreadful are the sins of a justified person, and on his singing, ‘Thy presence calls thee down’, I thought my soul was almost drawn out of my body to Christ” (Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield , vol. 1 [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1989], 370).

The sins of the world are bad, but the sins of Christians are even worse. There are at least three areas in which our sins become worse than the sins of other people. The first area is in that of God’s sovereignty or lordship. Central to the notion of the kingdom of God in the gospels is the idea of sovereignty and lordship. Now, in biblical thinking a kingdom is not so much a place over which a king rules as it is the activity of ruling. Thus, the kingdom of God as preached by Jesus means the sovereignty of God as that sovereignty has invaded the earth from the upper regions, from heaven. It is the kingdom of the heavens because it is the great God who dwells in heaven who has now come in the person of his Son to take control, to intrude himself upon this realm of humankind.

But when Christians sin, we say that that God’s sovereignty doesn’t really mean all that much and that the lordship of Christ is something negotiable. Now, we know in our modern times there is a controversy over the lordship of Christ, but how that could have ever arisen is really quite beyond me. Who can read even one page of the New Testament, without coming away with the very clear-cut notion that Christ is the Lord of his people and that the lordship of Christ not an option or a negotiable area? But when we sin, we say that lordship does not matter, that it is not impressing itself upon me for that moment. When I sin deliberately, I am declaring my attitude toward the lordship of Christ, which makes my sin worse than the sins of other people in principle.

The second area is that of God’s holiness. Now, suppose a bride, in the rush to get to the church, does not notice that there is a soiled spot on the back of her wedding gown. Imagine she is coming down the aisle with a grease spot on her otherwise immaculately white dress. As she walks down the aisle, do you think people are focusing on the dress as a whole? No! If we could read their minds, I am sure they would be thinking,”Oh, look at that! Look at that spot!” Why? The spot stands out in such stark contrast to the immaculate whiteness. So it is with the sins of Christians. Our sins are worse than the sins of other people because they are sins which really fly in the face of God’s holiness. The absolute, immaculate holiness of God is sullied and soiled because of my sin.

Do you know Oscar Wilde’s story of the picture of Dorian Gray? Dorian Gray was a young dandy in London who had a life-size portrait painted of himself. One day he looked at the portrait and said, “Oh, if only the picture could change and I could remain the same,” and that is precisely what happened. Not only were all his wrinkles and gray hair and all transferred to the picture, but also all of his sins. So Dorian Gray lived the life of a rake while all of his sins were transferred to the portrait. And at the end of the story, the picture was monstrously hideous. You see, there is such a thing as the scar tissue of sin. Thankfully, it is not revealed in the external person in most cases. But when we sin, God’s holiness is something that for the moment we trample upon and say that it doesn’t matter.

The third area is that of God’s grace. Now, the grievousness of a Christian’s sin against God’s lordship and his holiness is enough in itself to argue the point that the sins of Christians are worse than those of the world. But when we speak of grace, we talk about a love which is known, not unknown. When we speak of grace, we speak about a love which has sought us out, a love that nailed Christ to the cross, a love that daily blesses us, and a love that will not let us go. And so every sin of a Christian is, in effect, a statement that God’s love and grace–that covenant bond–is not meaningful at the moment of our sin. When we sin, we do so in the face of grace, holiness, and lordship.

Resolving Not to Sin

No wonder David resolves not to sin. I do not know when David wrote Psalm 119, but we get the impression that it is early on in his life because he poses the question, “How can a young man keep his way pure?” And the very interesting thing about Psalm 119 is that David extols the law of the Lord all the way through. Many times he declares that he loves it, delights in it, and strives to keep it. And then at the end of the psalm, he says that “I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands.”

While I don’t intend at this time to push a particular view of Romans 7, it is still very interesting to me that in Romans 7 Paul can say that he delights in the law of God in his inward person. He says that several times, and yet the gist of what he is saying in that chapter is that “I am one who wanders from that law. I am one who as a sheep goes astray and comes back.” And so David is a role model for us. We can identify with him because he is one who went very far off the rails, and yet he was determined that he was not going to sin. His resolution should be ours also.

Making Good the Resolution

How do we make good the resolution? Here we must back up to the first part of the verse where David says to God, “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” To accomplish anything we need a methodology, a proper way of doing things. What if you had a dictionary that was not arranged in alphabetical order? Do you think it might take you a while to find a word you wanted to look up? Methodology is important in chemistry. A chemist doesn’t just start throwing things together, because if he did so, sooner or later there would be a big bang. In fact, I have heard of chemical laboratories in which there are no windows because, after many explosions which blew out the windows, the building was redesigned with no windows. Methodology matters.

If we are going to make good the resolve not to sin, we have to have a method. I can resolve that I am going to fly to a certain city, but will I be able to sprout wings and just take off? No, that is patently absurd. There has to be a method, especially in this matter of not sinning, and so here David spells it out for us. He says, “I have hidden your word in my heart,” or according to some translations, “I have treasured your word in my heart,” and that is what it means. David says he will treat the word of God as a very precious object.

Suppose you have a stamp or a coin collection. What do you do when you go away on vacation? You hide it away. Why? It is a precious treasure which you want to protect against thieves. In the same way, we have a treasure, the word of God, and that word is hidden in the Christian’s heart, meaning the very center of the person. The heart is what the person really is deep down.

The process of hiding the word involves memorization to a certain extent, although memorization is not necessarily primary. Did not Albert Einstein say that he never memorized anything that he could look up? So whether you memorize the words of the book, or whether you know where to go to look up what you need, there has to be some way in which the word can get into your head and therefore into your heart. When I spoke on Psalm 73, the question was raised, “What do we do when we come to a Psalm 73-type of experience? How do we react, and what preparation can we make?” And I said that the best preparation we can have is to know where to find the principle so that we are able to call it to mind in those times. It may be that when we find ourselves as embittered in soul as this man was, we don’t want to read. It may be that we don’t desire to crack open a commentary and get down to the nitty-gritty of the text, but we know the principle that is there. And time after time I have found myself arrested by a principle which came to mind because I had committed the word of God to my heart.

The Living, Active Word

The word of God is dynamic, not simply print on the page. However, it does not have inherent power and efficacy, as some Lutheran brethren have claimed. I agree with Calvin who said that the power of the word, the dynamic of the word, comes because of the Spirit who gave the word by inspiration. The word of God is alive, dynamic and active, sharper than a two-edged sword, because the Spirit who gave the word will not relinquish his ownership of the word and his power over the word.

What do we find in the word of God? First, there are warnings that if we continue in a certain course of action we may expect judgment. Some of these warnings are quite awesome and severe. Have you read such warnings in the epistle to the Hebrews, say, or in Moses’ words to Israel in Deuteronomy 32 and other passages? These words bite, but they are there because they are part of the dynamic of the word that we are to hide in our hearts, even though it may be unpleasant to think of such things. The word of God also contains promises, and hand in hand with the promises are the provisions. Thus, the word of God is the sword of the Spirit, and when we hide the word in our heart, it becomes food, drink, and solace to us.

God’s word is our primary source document. It is good to read other books–as many as you have time to read–but tragedy will occur when all the other books take priority over this book. We may think, “Well, we have read the Bible from cover to cover several times. That is pretty much all we need to do.” And so we might go on and read the commentaries and other supplementary texts. Again, all that is fine in proportion, but first we need to be saturated with the very wording of the text itself!

Do you remember what Spurgeon said of John Bunyan? “You can take a pin and prick him anywhere, and he bleeds Bible,” meaning it just oozes and flows out. And if you have read Pilgrim’s Progress , you know how much Bunyan’s allegory is saturated with the very words, figures and images of Scripture itself.

I grant you that there will be times when you have to stop, think, and study the word carefully. A great deal of the time the real impact of the word is below the surface of the text. It is not necessary for everyone to become a specialist, but there is a place for thinking, pondering, and using the tools that are available so that we can know this word of words. If we have gotten away from chewing upon the word itself in this way, we need to come back to it. The only way not to sin is to treasure this book, the very word of God, in our inward persons, in the place where we really are and where no other really has access unless we allow them to come there. As we do that, then may we then say to God as David did, “I have hidden your word in my heart and treasured it up, that I might not sin against thee.”

What If We Sin?

We can speak in very idealistic and glowing terms about hiding, studying, and knowing the word. We can speak about our determination and resolution not to sin. Yet the truth of the matter is, we are going to sin. Someone wrote to John Newton once and posed this question. The writer wanted to know why God allows sin to continue in the lives of his people. And Newton answered, “We may reason, based upon the goodness of God as well as upon the sovereignty of God, that even continued sin is for the purpose of glorifying God even further in doing us good.” Now, here you are dealing with a mystery, a paradox. As Christians, we do not want to sin, we hide the word so that we will not sin, and yet we do sin. And when we sin, ultimately God is glorified because of it, and we are the better as God deals with us through it.

God Uses Even Our Sin

I want to suggest some ways how sin has a good effect. First, it reminds us that we need a Savior. Perhaps you attend a church in which you receive such solid instruction week in and week out. In such a place, if you pay attention even just half of the time, you will soon become very sophisticated theologically over a period of time. Suppose you set your mind to really get into the word, and you acquire your own library and read systematic theology and all the rest. You might become even more sophisticated.

There is a danger in being theologically sophisticated. We should study, but there is a real danger of forgetting our first love and starting to love learning more than we love Christ. But when theologically sophisticated Christians sin, they are brought back to the touchstone and reminded (in the words of the old gospel song) “I am simply a sinner saved by grace; this is my story: ‘To God be the glory!’ I am only a sinner saved by grace.” In other words, in spite of my attainments, usefulness, and high profile of service in the kingdom, the bottom line is that I am simply a sinner saved by grace. We must not lose our first love, and if we do, our sin will remind us of that lesson. If we forget, we will be reminded in no uncertain terms.

Second, we are driven to the blood of the cross and to the throne of grace to prayer on a continual basis because of our sin. Again, in someone wrote to John Newton: “Mr. Newton, I seem to get nothing out of prayer. I get no real help or benefit from it.” Have you ever had that problem? You don’t get anything out of prayer and it seems like you are just talking into a void. This is an age-old problem. But what did Newton tell the inquirer? He replied, “By all means, stay close to the throne of grace because if it seems that we get nothing out of being there, we may rest assured we will get nothing out of staying away.”

Newton was right. To use Calvin’s metaphor about prayer, it seems that God is sleeping sometimes, and so we have to raise our voices and shout to get his attention. That is a rather bold metaphor that Calvin uses, but it is based upon passages in the psalms. What about the story Jesus tells in Luke 11? A man comes at midnight to his friend, who is in bed with his children. He knocks on the door, saying, “Give me something. A friend of mine has come.” “Oh, go away!” his friend says. “Don’t you see what time it is?” But the first man keeps on knocking until finally, Jesus says, he gets his request. It may seem strange to us, but that is the way it operates. And so continued sinfulness on our part will drive us to the blood of the cross and back to the throne of grace to receive help in our time of need.

Do you see the mystery that is unfolding here in a sense? We do not want to sin and God does not want us to sin. Yet we do sin, and God uses our sin to minister to our good and to his greater glory. And in this, I grant you, you are dealing with a genuine paradox, although it is not the only paradox we find in Scripture.

Continued sin also reminds us that it is not time to rest yet. There is a Sabbath rest which remains for the people of God. It is a marvelous thing to trace out the theme of the Sabbath from the beginning in Genesis 2 through the Old Testament into the New Testament and to eternity. But the gist of the matter is that the writer of Hebrews bids us to enter into that which is God’s rest alone. When God rested in Genesis 2:3, his Sabbath rest began, and that Sabbath rest does not have an ending as do the other days of the creation week. Later on Psalm 95 we read, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert.” The writer of Hebrews takes both of those ideas and says, in effect, “Do not harden your hearts. Do not become further slack, fat, and dull in your hearing. We have to enter into a rest which is none other than God’s own rest, which he enjoys at the present moment, but it is not yet time to rest.”

Do you know what happens to men in war when they let down their guard and take a break? They pay for their rest with their lives. Suppose a man is out in the camp somewhere and decides to light up a cigarette because the enemy is far away and there seems to be no particular danger at the moment. As soon as he lights up, a sniper up in the tree sees that dot of light, and the man is gone, just like that.

It is not time to rest until the resting time comes. So we are spurred on to long for the time when sin will be no more. You see, when we get too comfortable, we begin to like this realm of existence just a little too much, don’t we? We forget that we are wandering in the wilderness and that although the whole of our experience is that of moving from the house of bondage to the place of eternal rest, in the meantime we are going around in circles in the wilderness. When we become too comfortable, as likely as not, something will happen that will upset that comfort and remind us that we are in the desert, the wilderness, and the wilderness is not Disneyland. It is not a fun palace. No, it is a hard and dangerous place, a place where your provisions are provided just on a daily basis, like the manna in the wilderness.

Our continued sin, then, is reminds us that we dwell in the place of sin, in this present evil age. If we forget that, we grow fat, lazy, and careless and can even come to the point where we love the creature rather than the Creator. How do we react when the Creator takes one of his gifts away? Do we spontaneously say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord”? I don’t think that I naturally and spontaneously say that. If you do, that is good. But I suspect there are some Christians to whom that doesn’t come so naturally. And those of us who are in this latter group need to learn to hold every possession with an open hand, not with a clenched fist, because in the process of losing, we are made to long for the time when sin will be no more, and when the wilderness period will be over, finally and definitively.

The Period of Overlap

For those reasons, and I would imagine even more reasons, continued sin paradoxically ministers to our good even while we are in the process of hiding the word in the heart so that we won’t sin anymore. You see, the whole of the Christian life is structured in terms of an overlap. In the creation everything was made to be very good, and yet the old creation went bad. From the time of Adam’s fall, there is a time line leading up to a certain point in history, which is the coming of Christ. When Christ came he established, in principle, a new creation and rectified the wrong done by Adam. For a period of time both ages run together and overlap, but one of these days the old will fall away altogether and only the new will continue forever. We are in that period of overlap.

I have said before that this is like a scene in an old cowboy movie in which the Indians catch the cowboy and tie one of his arms to one horse and the other arm to another horse. Then they snap the whip and the horses take off in different directions. The man who finds himself in that position experiences a certain amount of tension, does he not? In the same way we feel the tension of being drawn by the influences of the Spirit as we are also drawn by the influences and power of the present evil age. And so, until it is time to rest, we dare not rest. Renewing the Covenant through Resolution

You may ask, “Well, David sinned so grievously. How can he be any kind of a teacher for us?” To answer that, you must read the other psalms that David wrote. In Psalm 32, for example, David pours out his heart in remorse and grief because there had been an occasion on which he didn’t keep up his guard, an occasion on which he wasn’t hiding the word in his heart, but was simply feeding the lust that came so naturally to the heart of man. I would submit to you, then, that David is a very adequate role model for us because he is like us and we are like him. If he was resolved not to sin, then so should we be. If he hid the word in his heart that he wouldn’t sin, then so must we do that, even in the light of the paradox of continuing sin.

So the covenant is renewed by confession. and resolution. In our next study we will see how the covenant is renewed in the way that we react to those influences that would divide the mind. “Be anxious for nothing,” the apostle Paul says in the book of Philippians, and we will see that when you dig into his language, he is telling us that we must be a people who are undivided. And so, as we progress through these studies, you will see that renewing the covenant is not a matter of mechanically following steps one, two, three and four and so forth, but of imbibing the principles of the word and treasuring up those things so that we might not sin.

Our Father, how we thank you and bless you once again that your word speaks realistically to us! How we thank you that you found us when we were engulfed in sin and self-satisfaction and self-indulgence, and when, our Father, we sought to improve ourselves in various ways, all that self might be able to congratulate self and to say, “Look how good I am! Look what I have done! Look how all of this terminates upon me! Look at my empire!” There came a day when all of that was swept away and we came to understand that if we put away sin and shortcoming, it must be to the end that Christ would be glorified in our sanctification.

Our Father, we do indeed desire to be sanctified and put away sin. And yet we do it, not for self-glorification and self-gratification, but rather that Christ might see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. It is a great Savior and a goodly Master that we serve. So may it be, our Father, that in our pursuit of holiness that our eyes are fixed upon Jesus who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despised the shame, and he is now at your right hand, and he is the one who beckons to us to come through the wilderness–not to rest yet, but to fight the good fight of faith until such time as we see him face to face. Amen.