1 Corinthians 5:6-8

What did we miss? We’ve been trying hard to cover the bases, but we missed something. What did we miss? What have we forgotten? Where have we gone wrong? Our desire, I know this is true, our desire is to be pure and holy, to be people who love the Lord their God with all of their hearts and souls and minds and strength, to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. We want to obey the 10 commands. Not just 7 out of 10, but all 10. We want to be Godly people.

But what have we missed? What did we overlook? What aren’t we working on? What sin, what evil, what brokenness have we learned to live with. What sin has become so normal that it almost seems good? Sin appears holy. Evil is desired? What have missed?

Or are we even looking for it? We are hardwired to want satisfaction, to achieve contentment. And we know God wants us to be content, no matter the circumstances. We know that God wants us to be satisfied with what He has given to us. But at the same time, God wants a certain amount of dissatisfaction. He wants a holy discontent, where we’re never happy, we’ve never arrived, we’re constantly want to dig deeper and find that sin that we’ve been missing, that evil we’ve come to accept.

But what’s the big deal, right? I mean, if it was something big, like adultery or murder or stealing, I mean, we can see how that’s dangerous. Absolutely, we would deal with that harshly. We would judge it and condemn it. We wouldn’t stop talking about it until the person who was guilty either repented and stopped the sin, or left the church, went somewhere else where we didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

But 1 Corinthians 5 is talking about the little things here, and come on, everybody has a little something that they don’t do quite right, right? None of us are perfect, we recognize this. What’s the big deal? Verse 6:

Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough?

In Luke 13, Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like yeast, where just a little effect from Christ, through Christians, can have a huge effect all over the world. But evil works the same way, and again yeast is used to describe how just a little sin can have devastating effects.

Paul is thinking here of the Feast of Unleavened bread, the time of the year that the Israelites removed absolutely all of the yeast and leaven from their house. This was because they didn’t always use pure yeast to make their bread. Instead, they would use a starter dough, some dough left over from a previous batch, with some yeast left in it. This old, fermenting dough would have the same effect as new yeast, to raise the bread.

But this old, fermenting dough could also carry bacteria. And the older it became, the more dangerous it grew. The bacteria would grow stronger and stronger until it could make someone sick when they ate it. So, while the Feast of Unleavened Bread was a time to focus again on God and worship Him, it also had a health benefit, to get rid of the tiny little bacteria that could end up killing someone.

And this is the command given to us, verse 7:

Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are.

There is something old and nasty in each one of us. Something that we wouldn’t want anyone else to see. Something that we have to work awfully hard to cover up sometimes. Something that we have tried to convince ourselves that really isn’t that bad, not compared with a lot of other sins that we know other people are guilty of.

And maybe we don’t even notice this little old nasty sin. Maybe we don’t even know it’s there. We can be ignorant of our sin for a number of reasons. Sometimes, we really don’t want to know it’s there. We’re just better off not looking too closely at ourselves. We’re happier that way, being blissfully ignorant of our sin. Sometimes, we’re not aware of our sin because this sin has been handed down from generation to generation. Our parents sinned in a particular way, and they learned it from their parents, and we learned it from them. Our sin is a way of life, and has been in our family for generations. We can’t conceive of living any differently.

Whether we’ve been trying to cover it up and pretend like it’s not there, or whether we’ve been trying to convince ourselves that it’s really not that bad, or even if Grandpa did things this way, or Dad, it’s time for us to root it out. The yeast is beginning to smell. Our lives are beginning to stink. It’s time for us to clean house.

We do this by first using a flashlight to get into the corners, and the flashlight we use is Scripture. And not just the parts that we don’t have a problem with. Scripture, all of scripture. The big sins are obvious, but the little sins are sneaky, and therefore may be more dangerous. The little sins we can live with longer and hide better, so we need to take a careful look at every part of our lives.

We may go to church every Sunday, so when Hebrews 10:25 tells us to not give up meeting with one another, we feel pretty good. But what about Hebrews 12:15 tells us:

See to it that no one misses the grace of God

Has everyone in our life experienced the grace of God, or did they miss it in the way we spoke to them or treated them. We may not have murdered anyone, but there is not one of us who has loved our neighbor as much as we love ourselves all the time in every way. The more we look, the more we’ll notice. The more we compare our lives with God’s expectations as laid out in Scripture, the more we will realize how awfully far we have to go.

Now, maybe this absolutely overwhelming for us. When Jesus tells us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, and we begin to realize just what that means, we can give up pretty quickly. As we begin to compare our lives to God’s expectations, and as we discover more and more sin in those dark corners, we start to feel like giving up. You’d think that over time, we’d feel better about ourselves. You’d think that as we get older, and closer to God, that we would see ourselves as better people, as more holy and righteous.

But the more mature a Christian becomes, the more sinful they realize they are. The closer we grow to the Lord, the more we realize how far we have to go. It’s the new Christian that has no idea how sinful they really are. It’s the older, more mature Christian, who recognizes how filled with sin, how totally depraved they are. That can drag us down, we can feel a bit defeated about this, ready to give up, until we notice that little phrase there in verse 7:

be a new batch without yeast—as you really are.

Get rid of every little speck of sin, as you really are. Be completely holy, as you already are. Be perfect, be perfect, because you already are.

You’re already clean. You’re already flawless. You are textbook, picture perfect holy, verse 7:

For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

We celebrated this past Friday the victory that Jesus won when He suffered and died on the cross. We celebrated that He puts each and every sin to death, as surely as He was put to death. We celebrated the resurrection this morning. We sang and rejoiced that Jesus had got up off the ledge in that tomb, and walked out of His grave. This morning we celebrated the resurrection. Tonight we live it. We are clean. We are alive. We are pure. We just need to live it.

We don’t have to earn perfection, we’ve been given perfection already. We don’t have to work to be holy, we already are. We just need to act like it. Is this how you think of yourself? If I asked you, are you perfect, are you holy, what would you say? There is a kind of humility that keeps us from answering with a loud, confident “yes, I am perfect.” I know we don’t want to make ourselves look better than we are.

But something happens when we ignore the fact that when Jesus, our Passover lamb, was sacrificed, when He died and rose again, that changed us. We see ourselves as filled with sin, so then it’s only natural that we do sin. Everybody sins, that’s just the way things are, to err is human, after all, and we’re human, so we sin. We’re defeated before we even try, if we don’t know who we are.

But if we know who we are, if we know that we have given our lives over to Jesus, that He has wiped and scrubbed and washed away every last particle of sin, then why in the world would we sin? We’re perfect, we don’t do evil. We’re saints, we don’t sin. And victory over sin is that much more likely, pure thoughts, pure words will come more naturally, when we remember that purity is in our nature.

We’re not ignoring our sin. We’re not just brushing it under the rug. We’re not taking sin lightly when we recognize our purity. Instead, we are taking Jesus death and resurrection seriously. Which is heavier, the weight of our sin, or the weight of Jesus’ sacrifice? What has more effect on us, our former, evil nature, or the new life that Jesus has given to us?

You are perfect, if Jesus is your Lord and Savior. You are perfect, if you’ve trusted in Jesus for your salvation. You’re perfect, now, act like. Become what you already are. There are some ways we can do this, some actions we can take to search out the sins and become the clean house that we already are.

First, we have to become more comfortable with the fact that we are already perfect. The theological term is justification. You’ve hopefully heard this before, but justification means that God looks at you and me like we’ve never, ever sinned, not even once. That thing that we did this afternoon, that word that we spoke, that thought that we lingered on too long, it’s as if that never happened. It’s as if every word that we have ever spoken, every deed that we’ve ever done has been done absolutely perfectly, exactly like Jesus did it. We have to spend time getting more comfortable with who we really are, people who are perfect, because Jesus died and rose again for us. It’s more than okay to let that sink in. It’s necessary, it’s vital to us living the way we’re supposed to. With Jesus as your Savior, through His death and resurrection, you are perfect. You are perfect. Got it? Okay?

And then, with that fact firmly gripped, then we turn to scripture, all of it. We don’t just keep going back over the familiar texts that we have down. We open ourselves up to the full will of God, all of His commands. We are likely, we are able, it comes naturally to us to do His will. We can hear, “Go into all the world and make disciples” and know that we can actually do that, it’s in our nature. We can hear God tell us to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with our God, and know that’s in our DNA, we’re hardwired to do exactly that.

And now we’re ready to look at ourselves. With our perfection firmly gripped in one hand, and God’s perfect will grasped in the other, now we look at our lives to see how we need to become what we already are. We will probably need some help with this, someone safe, someone we trust, someone we know loves us to help identify those areas that don’t match with who we already are. We need to spend time alone with this close friend, confessing sins, opening our lives. We need to spend time alone with God, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal the sins, being honest with ourselves and with God, all while holding tightly to the fact that we are already perfect.

And holding on to God’s grace and God’s word, our house will grow clean, getting rid of, verse 8:

the yeast of malice and wickedness,

And living

the bread of sincerity and truth.

Just as you already are.