Holiness

 

 Pastor Ben continued the series on worship by starting with Romans 1:19-20. The passage states that God made Himself known to His creation and that He is holy. So what does this mean that God is holy and what does this mean? How often when we hear of Gods holiness do we shut down or redefine it so we can do what we want to do? When we do this we are making God in our own image and even making ourselves equal with God. Eve did this in the Garden of Eden and it didn’t work out so well. 

  My first thought is that God is transcendent. This means that not only is God holy, but He is also greater than us. Our greatest thoughts do not even come close to God and His greatness. Gods transcendence means He is all powerful, knowing, sinless and everything begins and ends with Him. This also means that God is everywhere and He sees everything. There is nothing that we can we can do or say that we can hide from God, so why do we even try to hide from God? The other thing about Gods transcendence is that since He is perfect and loving, He gets sets the standard of what is right and wrong. This also means that He will judge us for our actions. Even though God is holy and transcendent, we can still know Him through Scripture, creation and through Jesus. God gives us those rules because He is holy and that means He can not be in the presence of sin. The rules are not designed raptor be vindictive, but good and to protect us. 

 My second observation is that Leviticus 20:26 God states that He is holy and we should be holy also. So what does it mean to be holy? The first idea is that God calls us to live differently. One of the big tale aways from the book of Galatians that we went through is that we are not to bow down to or live by our fleshly desires. Being holy is about putting down our fleshly desires for those of the Holy Spirit. Holiness can be summed up in two concepts. The first one is that being holy means we are set apart. This means we belong to God and He has created us for a specific purpose and to fulfill that purpose which is to worship God with everything we have and in everything we do. The second part of being made holy is following the  two greatest commandments, which is loving God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as ourselves. The only way this can happen is letting God come in and change our hearts. This means that we allow God to come in and change our desires from worshipping ourselves to worshiping Him with all we have and wanting to honor Him in all we do by being obedient to His leading.

  My third observation is the idea is how do we become holy?  The first thing is that we can not just accept Jesus as our Savior but we also must make Him our Lord. We can only pledge complete allegiance to one thing or person, and it needs to be God. Not only is He our Savior, but we also need to make Him our king and be obedient to His leading. There are two theological principles come into play here. The first one is what God does to us. This is how we become holy, by God not only forgiving us, but changing our desires and ridding our sinful nature and replacing it with His if we allow. The second part is what God does through us. What Good is being holy if we don’t let God work through us. This is where loving our neighbor comes in. Being holy is more than prayer, Scripture reading and going to church. It is about God working through us so when He calls is to serve that person that we don’t like and maybe even hate, we can rely on Gods grace and Stregnth and not our own. When we do this we see how God values people and not how we vale people because we can treat others or ourselves like garbage. Holiness provides a way to live a changed life while impacting the world for God. 

  I will close with this. The great church reformer John Wesley has a quote that goes “there is no personal holiness unless there is social holiness,” means that our growth in God has to lead to building personal relationship with God is good, but we also need to share our relationship with God and how He has changed us with other people. 

Grace and Peace

Tom Boustead