Holiness

Following Christ and Listening To the Spirit

Christian Spirituality > Holiness

What Is Holiness?

God calls us to be holy. After all, God is holy. (Most of us just assume that, but in the Bible they're so awestruck by God, they keep saying it : ; ; 1 Corinthians 1:2; Ephesians 1:4). When we speak of the 'Holy Spirit', we're saying the Spirit is holy. If we are 'indwelt' and even 'filled' with the Spirit, does it mean holiness is in us? But what is holiness? Following the law? A saintly countenance? A quietude people can see? Churchly achievement? Excellent performance? Good deeds? Good PR? Being super nice to everyone?

The holy life is simply living as someone who belongs to God and who lives by the vision of the Kingdom of God. Were it only so simple. For we, on our own, don't have much to work with. We can't rightly envision what a life of holiness is, and even if we could, we couldn't get ourselves to be that way. So, the Spirit brings us into the holiness of Jesus. (I'm not talking about a holiness 'like' Jesus' or a holiness in Jesus' style. Thanks to the Spirit working through your faith, Jesus is really there with you and within you, giving you Jesus's holiness.)

Some Christians emphasize biblical standards of holiness. Some call this legalism, and unfortunately sometimes it is legalism. Firmer roots for personal holiness grow when we recognize that we are broken creatures, through and through. Even our vision of what makes for holiness is marred and twisted. We start growing in Christ as we learn we are strangers to God's ways. This leaves us no recourse but pray for the Spirit's leading. Without the Spirit's work, we not only cannot know God, but we also fail to discover our true selves. The Spirit, through the Bible, shows us what a God-pleasing life is, and leads us to want to live it and treasure it.

God doesn't get appeased by your doing good things, any more than by sacrifice of a virgin or conquest of a nation. God's not impressed. God does better things in the first minute of each morning than anything we ever did. If you need Godliness, only God has it, so only God can give it to you. It is 'earned' in a sense, but only by what Christ did. And through what Christ did, his life, death, and transcendence of death, God gave it to you. The light shines on you, and from there it reflects onto everything else.

Beyond The Golden Rule

Whether we're Christian or not, we've all been taught the Golden Rule : "do unto others as you would have others do to you". Jesus , in a positive restatement of something already in the Jewish oral tradition. It makes life's decisions a lot clearer by putting you in your own harm's way. Think like that, and you won't be so eager to do in your main rival at work. We often pull up short when we feel in our own back the knife which we just started to twist into someone else's. This is a good place to start : there actually is something for us to measure up to. Yet there are some things missing in the Golden Rule. There is, of course, the sado-masochist twist -- someone doing unto others the torture he so craves from them. A more important problem, though, is that the Golden Rule keeps you in the center of it. No matter how many lessons you learn from trading places, they're still your lessons, and it's still your human capacity to love. This capacity is more like a dinner plate than a deep well, shallow when compared with the task at hand of living a loving and holy life.

Jesus takes us beyond the Golden Rule. The first step past it is when Jesus commends Deuteronomy 6:5's about loving God, and the second like unto it, originally from (you know, the book everyone loves to avoid), to "love your neighbor as yourself". Jesus then measures this not by one's own efforts, but through . Jesus calls on us to be a neighbor, moving the focus from ourselves to others, especially another who is in need.

But one more step is needed. For while this approach builds up our capacity to love, it is still our human capacity to love we're giving out. In John's Gospel, Jesus makes the final step to setting this right, by giving a "" : "that you love one another, just as I have loved you". There is now a new measure : to love as Jesus loved. Right after He said that, He went on His way to setting a beyond our wildest imaginings : to the cross and the tomb. Then, He gave out a new power to love in such a manner : He emptied His tomb, and went back to God's Beyond, sending the Holy Spirit to us in His place. What the Spirit gives us is Jesus' holiness and Jesus' love, the bottomless well of boundless love. No longer do we have to dish out our own love in saucer portions, we can now drench everybody with love from beyond ourselves. We can now dare to live the life of holy love, trusting that in the end there is no loss where that kind of love is found.
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This is the stuff that's filling our minds. Many people even call it "getting real", because 'this is how the real world is'. But there's nothing 'real' about it. It is all about seeming to be what you're not. What's 'real' about that?. In the eyes of God, the Ultimate Reality:

• God knows even your inmost thoughts, thus you are so "caught";
• You can't get anywhere near big enough to throw your weight around with God;
• God doesn't care what it 'looks like', only what it is;
• Your cover-ups have consequences too, and the more you cover up the cover-ups of your cover-ups, the greater and more deadly the consequences will be;
• God doesn't believe; God knows, holds to the truth, and calls on us to hold to it too;
• Rules are made so you stay aware that you are not God, and so we all don't have to be as good as God in order to live reasonably well with each other.

You can't be made holy if you're worrying about protecting yourself or about getting success or sex or fame or power, or even keeping up an image as a 'holy man'. Your life becomes more holey than holy. There's just no place for that before the God who ultimately determines your safety, success, or power. God wants you to really 'get real'. The emperor Ego has no clothes, and the Spirit is the little boy who has the sense to say so.

Holiness Within a Larger Struggle

Living holy is not only pleasing to God, it is displeasing to those who work evil in the world. To live as a follower of Christ and to love your neighbors as yourself is an act of spiritual warfare against evil. The struggle can be waged by acts as simple as :

• telling the truth instead of lying,
• treating people with respect instead of cussing them out,
• listening instead of blowing them off,
• deciding not to spread the juicy gossip you've heard,
• ordering vegetable juice instead of a daiquiri.

It could be :

• some gentle words for your girlfriend,
• a helping hand to an elderly woman in a store,
• simple 'thank yous' to the people who've helped you along,
• an act of kindness to a stranger, just to be kind,
• keeping your lifestyle simpler and less upper-class than your neighbor's.

You could choose to do something else, and the idea would not usually be from the Devil. But that idea would still have to be chosen *against* when there is a more Christlike response to be chosen *for*. Thus it could be something like :

• choosing not to throw your punch or draw your knife,
• choosing not to walk out on your marriage,
• choosing not to abort your child,
• choosing to stop trying to be a star so you can have time to work with troubled teens,
• choosing not to step all over your colleagues to get promoted.

Even that which you are allowed to do, which you are morally justified in doing, which would make your life easier, which would give you more success or more control over your life -- even those things are to be turned away, if there is a more Godly choice to make. These spiritual struggles are fought in you and in the parts of society around you, every moment of every day. When Christ says "Follow me", He is showing you the way forward for a holy life.
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Holiness Quotes

"When He wore a crown of thorns, do you wish to wear a crown of gold?"
Johann Arndt, *True Christianity*.

"Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things."
Blaise Pascal

"Frightful this is in a sense, but it is true, and every one who has merely some little knowledge of the human heart can verify it: there is nothing to which a man holds so desperately as to his sin."
Søren Kierkegaard

"The reigning cliche of the day is that in order to love others one must first learn to love oneself. This formulation -- love thyself, then thy neighbor -- is a license for unremitting self-indulgence, because the quest for self-love is endless. By the time you have finally learned to love yourself, you'll find yourself playing golf at Leisure World."
Charles Krauthammer in *Time* magazine, 28 June 1993

"[Spirituality] arises from a creative and dynamic synthesis of faith and life, forged in the crucible of the desire to live out the Christian faith authentically, responsibly, effectively, and fully."
Alister McGrath, *Christian Spirituality*

"Everyone thinks of changing humanity, and no one thinks of changing himself."
Leo Tolstoy

"Pietists believe that evangelism is the preaching of the Law, to show man what he is in himself, and of the Gospel, to show how differently God now sees him in Christ and his responsibility to live in this new light. This is the theology of Word and Sacrament -- a creative 'can do' which replaces that 'can't do' of the Law. We reject the cognitive theory of religion that says a man can learn what is right and follow it. We also reject that peculiar.... idea that says when you know the right theology you have reached the goal. We hold that a belief which does not accomplish change has not been assimilated and cannot be classified as Luther's 'true and living faith.'"
Ron Zess

"Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it."
Charles Caleb Colton

"For perfection, it is better for us to go through the crucible and conquer ourselves; to love God, it is better not to be perfect. How much better it is to be with Him than to compose one's perfection."
Eugraph Kovalevsky, *A Method Of Prayer* (Praxis, 1993)

Every time we say, "I believe in the Holy Spirit," we mean that we believe that there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.
J. B. Phillips, *Plain Christianity*

Illumine our minds, our souls inspire
Vouchsafe to us love's holy fire
Thy wondrous pow'r on us bestow,
That we in grace and strength may grow.
"Creator, Spirit, Heavenly Dove", verse 3
(unknown 8th cent., translated by Luther into German, later translated into English)

"Glory be to 'the Holy Ghost.' Oh, I'm full of spirit, I am not unenlightened. I also have feeling, heart, sentiment, and imagination. But do I ever hold still in order that the wholly Other may fill me with his Spirit and give me a sense of the true priorities in life?"
Helmut Thielicke (as published in *Leadership Journal*, Fall 95)

"Holiness is a state of soul in which all the powers of the body and mind are consciously given up to God."
Phoebe Palmer

"You may as well quit reading and hearing the Word of God, and give it to the devil,
if you do not desire to live according to it."
Martin Luther