The Importance of Personal Holiness

It’s been a little while, but I’m back in full force today. I’m going to riff on something that’s serious to me because it’s serious to God. And it’s serious to God because it’s integral to His character. That, dear brothers and sisters, is His (and your) holiness.

He says in Leviticus, “Be holy, for I am holy”(Leviticus 11:44). Jesus says, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48). If you read these verses and truly understand what the Father and Son are saying, you realize that the Christian life is not a game. At all. It is not a peripheral aspect of your identity. If you love the Lord with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength, you will “keep His commandments” (John 14:15). Who you are is defined by who Christ says you are and who Christ says you should be. So what is that? Well, what He seems to be saying is that you need to be holy like God and perfect in your obedience of God.

“But how?”, you may ask. “How in the world does Jesus expect this from me?” I’ll be the first to say that there’s no scriptural indication that this perfection that we are called to will be manifested in our life on Earth. Rather, sanctification is the process by which we are constantly being pruned so that Christ will "present us blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy" according to Jude. So we will be perfect. Then. But this does not remove the impetus to pursue it now. Don’t think that just because you won’t be perfect before you die, you don’t have the responsibility to obey God right now. You and I do Him an injustice and we spit in the face of the crucified Christ when we live as though He did not call us to a holy and sanctified life. So how do we do it? Quite frankly, we believe, we trust, and we obey.

1^st Step: Faith

Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Such are the words of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Obviously this makes a lot of sense. Do I really think that just because I avoided that sexual temptation, God’s smiling down on me, thinking, “Good one, Malcolm! You’ve been so good that I accept you!”? Nope. Not at all. Nothing I can do apart from God can please him. Jesus would go a step further and say that I can’t “bear any fruit” apart from Him, the true vine. So the first step in my journey towards holiness is faith: trust in Christ and submission to Christ. It is only then that I even have the ability to obey Him. I absolutely must believe that Jesus Christ was God made man (to borrow language from Cyril of Alexandria), was crucified, became sin for me, died, was raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven in order to approach the almighty Father with anything. Without the sacrifice of Christ, I have no hope in approaching a holy God. I am otherwise stuck with the ancient people of Israel and I have once again hung the veil, so to speak. But because of Christ, that veil has been torn and I can freely come to the Father and the Father, Son and Holy Ghost have made their dwelling with me! (John 16)  Hallelujah!

2^nd Step: Works or Obedience

Faith and works are a dialectic, not a dichotomy. A conversation, not a contradiction. Only if I truly trust and truly submit to God, will I realize that any other path of walking is woefully inadequate. When I, through meditation on and contemplation of His Word, come into contact with the living God, His majesty, His power, and His love, it is a reminder that I need to get back on track morally. Your faith in who Christ is and what He has done should provide the impetus toward obedience and good works. After all, He died because of your sin. Doesn’t that perhaps make you not want to sin? This isn’t a guilt tactic, but rather it is merely a statement of truth. Our sin is disgustingly offensive to the character of God, but he still loved us in this specific way: that he gave his unique Son so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have everlasting life. In the words of Paul, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure”(Philippians 2:12).  Please God and work for His glory because for you whom He foreknew, “he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And [you] whom he predestined he also called, and [you] whom he called he also justified, and [you] whom he justified, he also glorified.” You have been called according to HIS purpose. ACT LIKE IT.*

*It is all caps for a reason. This is my admonition to myself and to the rest of Christendom heh heh. If we truly will be saved (in the sense that salvation is a future event) and we are now attached to the vine, we will bear fruit and the Father will prune us so that we bear even more fruit. If we're not bearing fruit, we must re-evaluate our priorities and our lives and bring ourselves back in holy communion with our Eternal Source, the Triune God. So act like it.  

Note: If you try to be perfect, you will fail. That's just a fact. And it seems contradictory to what I've been saying. But the Scripture says that it isn't. We don't trust in our own righteousness but rather we count all that we have "gained" rubbish, so that we may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of our own which comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith - that we may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible, we may attain the resurrection of the dead (Philippians 3:8-10). Because I don't know about you, but if this life were all that is, the only proper response would be despair. But that's not the world that God created. And that's not the plan He has for you.