The old word for holy in the German language, heilig, also means healthy. And so heilbronn means holy-well, or healthy-well. You could not get any better definition of what holy really is than healthy—completely healthy.
~Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
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. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. ~ 1 Peter 2:9-12
How little people know who think that holiness is dull.
When one meets the real thing… it is irresistible.
If even 10 percent of the world’s population had it,
would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end?
~ C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Holiness. This word almost seems like an antique in our post-modern world. We wink and nod when some wild-eyed mystic tells us that the Bible tells us we can be holy. Then we walk out of the service and and roll our eyes at the man who just poured G_d’s heart out onto us.
Might we, just for one minute, consider the truth that all of the Bible is true? All the way through Scripture, it tells us a few things very clearly. First, it tells us that G_d is absolutely holy, and that He does not change. Then it tells us that we are being made like Him in every way that it is possible for a human to be like Him.
Going further, though, comes the bad news in the Bible: there is no way we can be like Him. Our spirits are willing, but they are too poor, and our flesh is definitely too weak. This is really scary. Because we (most of us) see the wretched condition of our body and soul. We are, not to put too fine a point on it: incomprehensibly evil. We are, left to ourselves, desperately wicked. We are doomed to an eternal separation from the One we are trying so hard to find. We want to be good. We want to be good, and we finally come to realize that we cannot.
But G_d (oh, isn’t this a wonderful phrase throughout the Bible!) then lays on the Good News in huge waves of truth and Love. He weaves it throughout the whole thing. He is good (only Him). He is righteous. He is holy. And He will make us like Him if we simply ask Him to do it. He has clearly said, that He just wants us to truly believe that this can happen. That HE can make us like Himself, through His power and work in our lives. He says that, in believing Him to be true in all things, He imparts all that is good about Him onto and into us.
Beloved, if we really think about it, can we not see that many of us live unholy lives because the Bible IS true in all things about holiness? The Bible says we cannot be holy on our own. We cannot be good enough. We cannot follow enough rules to pull this off. So, if we try, we will fail – and we will be doomed. But the Bible also says that His strength is made perfect in our weakness. That as we submit to Him, we actually can resist evil – and it has to go away. That as we put our faith in Him alone, He makes us righteous. This is really good news!
Could it be that a simple faith in Him, perhaps one like a child rightly has in a good father, is the key to whole thing? Could it be that we can re-find our innocence and purity by simply (as in completely) trusting Him to work this in our lives?
Would that we might inventory every time that we act as one who is unholy. Is it ever because G_d failed to act rightly in our lives? Or is it because we stopped letting Him work, and we yanked back the place of authority and decided that we were going to show G_d how much we really wanted to do the right thing from now on?
Might we tonight, make a simple and pure declaration. A declaration that we are His precious chosen possession; that we are not our own. A declaration that we do not have any right to live the life that this world offers us to live on our own. We are now citizens of another place. A place where there is only One Authority, One Power, One Glory. He gets to call the shots. He is telling us to be holy, and that He will give us the ability to be this way.
And maybe, next time, when that fiery preacher tells us to be holy, we’ll realize that He is just passing on a message directly from the One who can make us that way.
It is quite true to say, “I can’t live a holy life,” but you can decide to let Jesus make you holy.
~Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)
