The word holiness makes me think “absolute sinlessness.” It sounds completely out of reach. And yet God has said, “Be ye holy, even as I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44, 45; 19:2; 1 Peter 1:15, 16). That’s a pretty intimidating command. Overwhelming. Impossible. I don’t think I can become that, and I still don’t even know what it really means.
So I looked it up. Do you know what the definition of holiness is? It’s the state of being holy. Okay, that didn’t help me much.
It occurs to me that holiness is like humility, in this way: if you’re trying to achieve it or measure it, you probably don’t have it. Oswald Chambers talked about “unconscious holiness,” and he implied that it comes about through “conscious repentance.”
We can find religious articles that encourage us in our quest for holiness, advising the practice of things like praying daily, reading the Bible, meditating on God’s word, spending time in silence and solitude, fasting, and serving. And of course, these lists also add in things you should avoid, things we know are contrary to God’s righteousness. Dos and don’ts: they can seem a dreary obligation of requirements for earning God’s favour. We can employ some of these things in our life and yet still feel no closer to God. We can completely exhaust ourselves trying. It can be a whole lot of self-effort, very little of which seems fruitful. It’s a lonely place to live. We feel we just can’t do it by ourselves.
And that’s the first thing God wants us to recognize: we can’t do it by ourselves, and he never intended that we would. His whole plan is based on “Christ in us, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27), the only hope for holiness here on earth. May He increasingly make real in our lives the mystery: “…I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20, KJV).
He also wants us to stop thinking in terms of earning his favor. We already have it, and we didn’t earn it. Remember the message from the angels to the shepherds on the night Jesus was born, Luke 2:14: “Peace on earth, goodwill toward mankind.” It was the announcement of the fulfillment of a prophecy of Isaiah (61:2, NLT), “The time of the Lord‘s favor has come.”
It’s a good book I’m reading, The Utter Relief of Holiness, but I have probably spent more time thinking about the title than about the contents, trying to understand that word. Something that gives me a huge clue is the subtitle: How God’s Goodness Frees Us from Everything that Plagues Us. With this title and subtitle, the author is clearly equating holiness with goodness. So that is a great place to start. And if God’s holiness truly can free us from everything that plagues us, it surely must be an extremely important and practical thing. I mean, wouldn’t you like to be free from everything that troubles you?
So we’ll start by equating holiness with goodness. But God is more than just goodness. Now my memory retrieves something from the Amplified Classic Bible: Oftentimes when the word faith is used there, it is broken down into this: “the leaning of the entire human personality on God in absolute trust and confidence in his power, wisdom, and goodness.” What if these other two words give us a fuller picture of holiness? What if, in addition to goodness, holiness also means power and wisdom?
I have often thought of and spoken of that definition of faith in the Amplified translation in this way: “God is all wise, so He knows the best thing to do and when to do it. He is all good, so what He chooses in His wisdom is always the most beneficial thing for us. His word assures us that He is always working everything together for good, that He intends for our ultimate benefit even the things that the enemy intends for evil, things that certainly to us seem at first to be nothing but disastrous. So God knows the wise thing to do; He anticipates the good thing, the best thing, to do; and then, being all powerful, He also has the power to pull off what needs to be done.”
I recently found these three attributes echoed in a description of “God’s essential nature” written in the 1800s by Adam Clarke, a Methodist theologian and biblical scholar: “God is ... of perfect goodness, wisdom and power...” (quoted by Dallas Willard in Life Without Lack).
Back to that intimidating list and how it seems to tap in to our subconscious striving for God‘s approval: we must understand that these “spiritual disciplines” (on the list) do not lay claim to any merit; they will not earn us any points with God. But rather, they benefit us directly by our practicing them, building our character and faith, deepening our knowledge and understanding of God, so that He can entrust to us greater responsibility and blessing. We also will find that He surprises us with deep insights and sudden visits of His presence, right in the middle of such practices, and we will find ourselves thinking what we would have missed if we had instead been off running after our busy lives.
But as far as finding acceptance with God and being declared righteous in His sight, we must always remember that that status comes only by God’s grace, through our faith in Him, our trust “in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead (Romans 4:24, NIV).
Once we have been converted, reconciled to God through faith, we may be ready to die and go to heaven, but we are not yet ready to live on this planet, at least not victoriously. This is where discipleship and the practice of the spiritual disciplines are so key. So if you find you’re not living the life of an overcomer, you might want to ask yourself: “Am I a disciple, or just a convert?”
When the Bible tells me to be holy even as God is holy, I feel at first like I’ve come up against an insurmountable wall. But if holiness is power and wisdom and goodness, I can begin to see some hope. It’s not hard to believe that God wants to bring more of these three things into my life—and through my life to others. As I trust God, as I truly seek Him, reading His Word and allowing it to be “functionally authoritative”* in my life, I grow in the character of Christ. I take on more of His goodness and wisdom.
As we pursue Christ by way of the spiritual disciplines, as we spend time with Him, we catch glimpses of Him. Scripture says that “when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2, NIV). But that process is already in motion here on earth. The more we “see” Him, the more we are becoming like Him.
As we walk with Jesus, He teaches us to take up our cross daily. We learn to die to ourselves and, in love, to put others before our own needs and desires. Death to self slowly and surely brings humility. It is only in true humility that we can be trusted with God’s power. Having the ability to exercise the power of God is much too heavy an experience for our flesh to handle. It would gorge itself on aggrandizement, pig out on pride.
Many Christians yearn to walk in the power that we see displayed in the Book of Acts and in the stories of great men and women of God through the centuries. We have not understood that the uncrucified self stands in the way of God’s entrusting His power to us. As we will slowly come to learn, it is a kind and merciful thing that God calls us to die to ourselves, because it will free us from the tyranny of self. My husband said recently, “Jesus didn’t die for us so that we wouldn’t have to; he died so that we could die too.” I’ve often thought about the verse that calls us to “make up what is behind of the sufferings of Christ” (Colossians 1:24): What spiritual provision could possibly be lacking in the crucifixion of Christ? The answer is death to self. It’s the one thing Christ cannot do for us. But He commanded it, and He showed us how it’s done, not just in His death, but all throughout His life.
Jesus said that if we try to save our life, we’ll lose it, but that if we lose it for His sake, we will truly find it (Matthew 10:39). This is a verse that comes to me over and over in my own thinking and writing. I want the life He offers; it’s worth giving up the life I think I have, in order to find it.
When God calls us to holiness, I believe he is calling us to continually greater wisdom, greater goodness, and greater power. How else will we ever be and do what Jesus has called us to: “The works that I do, these shall you do and even greater” (John 14:12)?
There is another way I think about this command from both the Old and New Testaments, “Be ye holy, even as I am holy,” and it really takes the pressure off us. When God commanded light into being, saying, “Let there be light,” the word let does not appear in the original language; therefore He was saying something more like “Be light” or “Light, be!” He commanded the light to be. And yet none of the power to become, none of the effort, came from the as-yet-nonexistent light itself. It all came from God.
In the same way, think about the command to be holy: not so much a commandment as a proclamation and a promise, with the power to do it coming from the One who “is at work in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13, KJV). Our job is simply to come to him, and to yield to Him. This is part of ongoing repentance: we cooperate; we align ourselves with him. Holiness is His work and His alone.
* * *
* “functionally
authoritative” is how Dallas Willard describes what kind of place we should give the Word of God in our lives.
