The Lord has impressed on me to get, and pass on, deeper insight on a subject near and dear to His heart: holiness. Spoiler alert: look for a couple of posts on holiness in relation to various aspects of the Christian life.
I wrote previously about the relationship between holiness and the armor of God. Today, we zoom out just a little and look at holiness as an integral part of our true identity – who we are in Christ, and Who Christ is in us.
The Apostle Peter made the importance of holiness very clear in his first letter to the believers scattered around Asia Minor:
As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
1 Peter 1:14-16
He quotes Leviticus 11:44, thinking back to the first days the people of Israel were wandering around the desert, having just been liberated from 400 years of slavery and needing to learn their identity as a people belonging to God. During that time, God gave them laws to follow that would ensure their holiness in conduct toward each other, toward things of the earth, and toward the nations around them. In Leviticus 20:26 He states: “You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.”
That is the root of holiness. Separated from the peoples. God’s possession. Clear adherence to a culture that is different from that of the world.
The Greek word Peter uses is “hagios”(ἅγιον) which means “set apart” or “sacred.” The word in the Hebrew text of Leviticus 20:26 is “kadosh” ( קָד֖וֹשׁ ), from the root word “kodesh” which means “to consecrate” or to “set apart.” The people of Israel were to be different in the way they lived so that it would be clearly visible that they were set apart by God as His possession.
The same goes for Christians. The New Testament admonishes us that we should no longer live as unbelievers, driven by the passions of the flesh, but rather visibly belong to God. It should be immediately clear from the way we think, speak, and act that we are consecrated to God.
Peter picks up that theme in the second chapter:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.“ 1 Peter 2:9-11
A holy nation, possessed by God, called out of darkness and brought into His light and His mercy, and because of that “aliens and sojourners” who purposefully do not give in to their natural passions but rather are passionate about God’s design for their lives.
Be holy. Be sojourners and aliens who have severed their emotional attachment to their desires and the world that appeals to those. Those are commands that we are to live by and that is both good news and bad news.
The good news is that we can’t fulfill those commands in our own strength. Just look at Israel. Before long they forgot their consecration and adopted the religions and customs of the people around them even though they knew that God hated those. Under the new covenant, God puts His Spirit in us to change our nature, our appetites, our desires, and our character. Paul puts it this way:
“…for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Philippians 2:13
We have received holiness – consecration to God and complete cleansing from sin – as a gift that is part of our salvation. It was purchased for us by the blood of Christ. A holy life, which exhibits the traits of God’s nature, is being worked out in us by God.
The bad news is that many of us struggle with that, especially because of the sentence that precedes Philippians 2:13: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” (verse 12).
We find it hard to understand that what God works in us, we have to work out. How do we do that? And why are we supposed to do that with fear and trembling? Aren’t we supposed to be free from fear?
Let’s start there: because we know that the Holy Spirit (The Spirit Who is Holy) indwells us and works in us to do what we cannot, namely to please God in the way we use our will, and in the actions that result from the use of our will, we should have a deep respect for the holiness of God. Holiness to which every trace of sin is abhorrent. And that fear should drive us to make our whole life about letting God develop His holy nature within us because that, and only that, can please Him. It is a holy fear, deep, reverent awe of the holiness of God that leads to an unrelenting desire to see HIs holiness brought to bear within us.
Hebrews 12:14 admonishes us to “strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” Knowing that we cannot produce holiness in ourselves, it must mean that we focus our whole life on holding fast to the Lord like branches on the vine through unceasing prayer, devotion to the Word, obedience to the Word, whereby we work hard every day to focus our hearts and minds away from the desires of the flesh and the world and unto God. As we do, the life-giving “sap,” the nature of the Lord flows into us and through us to produce the fruit of the Spirit (See Galatians 5:22). And it is the fruit of the Spirit that is the only concrete and genuine evidence that we are holy and the Spirit of God lives in us. Letting go of God by neglecting our devotion to prayer and the Word results in the opposite – a return to the principles and desires of human nature and the world, whereby our holiness is no longer visible since the fruit stops growing and dries up.
J.C. Ryle, the first Anglican bishop of Liverpool, wrote a series of essays about holiness in which he lamented the condition of the Christian Church that took holiness too lightly and justified cutting corners on the hard work it takes to abide in Christ and not hinder His sanctifying work in us.
More than a century later, it seems we are there again. We have replaced the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in our churches with disco balls, smoke, laser lights, and pounding rock music in order to make it “fun” to go to church. We have become permissive about things the Bible clearly denotes as abhorrent to the Lord. Things like tattoos (see Leviticus 19:28), yoga (a form of exercise that consists of worship poses to Hindu gods), and the Enneagram (which employs personality types that were conceived by a New Age occultist who received them by the demonic practice of “automatic writing.”) The Bible states that God hates divorce (see Malachi 2:16), yet more than 50% of Christian marriage end that way. Church growth has borrowed so heavily from corporate business principles that many churches look more like businesses promoting brands than the Body of Christ spreading the gospel. Recent surveys have indicated that most American believers who consider themselves born again and saved only prays a few minutes a day, and, according to a LifeWay study, only 19% read their Bible daily. Those are symptoms of a Church that has forgotten the importance of holiness.
Holiness does not mean being superior, stoic, or aloof. It does mean being counter-cultural in the sense that Christians are to be visibly different from non-Christians through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in them which they intentionally and wholeheartedly embrace – in word and in deed.
Holiness is our true identity. We are the “hagioi,” the saints, the consecrated ones, who belong to God and not to ourselves or the world around us.
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” 1 Corinthians 6:19,20.
As the people of God in the US, we need to awaken to our true identity, and in particular our holiness. We could stand a little fear and trembling at the notion that a holy God indwells us and wants us to be holy because He is holy. And to throw ourselves at His mercy to work holiness in us because we know that friendship with the world is enmity with God (James 4:4) and that He hates sin so much that we are to reckon our sinful nature as dead:
“So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.” Romans 6:11-13
Dead to sin. Alive to Christ. Do not present yourself to sin but present yourself to God. Every day. Every moment. In fear and trembling at becoming unholy again after He has made us holy. Because you were bought with a price. You don’t belong to yourself or the world anymore, but to Him.
All He wants is you to put yourself at His disposal every day. He does the rest.
Our daily consecration as holy people matters to Him, and so it should matter to us. We need the return of holiness as the time has come for the Bride to prepare herself for the return of the Groom.