Why Be Holy?
What’s The Point?
If you read our most recent post earlier this week, you know that we are taking this month to discuss the huge topic of holiness. Many believers in this day and age look at the word holy and read it in the scriptures and often think of it as just some religious word that means just that, ‘to be religious’. However, as we have seen, when we view holiness in this regard, we miss out on so much of not just what holiness is, but why God is described as this and why we are called to be it. A low view of holiness gives us a lower view of God and a lesser standard for ourselves. So why be holy? If this word truly means to be ‘set apart’, why does this matter? Why would God want His people set apart from the rest of the world if we’re all living together anyway? God’s Word has a few things to say about this exact thing. As John MacArthur says, “When we think of God’s holiness, we think of His utter separation from sin because everything in the creation is affected and influenced by sin. But there’s more to His separateness than that. However, that for us is the graphic illustration.” God is separated from evil for all time, nothing unholy can even exist around Him because of how set apart our Lord is. And while we can’t achieve this level of holiness since all are born in sin, we are still called to be set apart in some way from the rest of the world. Let’s look at a few examples of this.
God Says So
1 Peter 1:15-16 tells us, “but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written: “YOU SHALL BE HOLY, FOR I AM HOLY.” As much as this sounds like your mom disciplining you, the first reason we should strive for holiness is because God says so. Our Lord is the one who designed all things and every being on earth, so if He wants to set standards for His creation, who are we to say no? We should strive to be set apart from this earth in order to please our Father in heaven who has designed us to be set apart anyway. Regardless of what else scripture has to say about this, the fact that God says so is more than enough for us to do our absolute best to fulfill this. But of course, there’s more reasons in God’s Word than this. Look at what 1 John 3:9 says, “No one who has been born of God practices sin, because His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin continually, because he has been born of God.” This might be the biggest separation from the rest of the world that we see in the Bible. As people who are born of God, we no longer practice sin. This world, under their own authority, couldn’t care less about what they do or what God calls sin. The only god they serve is themselves and they will do whatever they see fit.
The moment we are born again, we begin to hate this way of living. And the more we are sanctified as we follow the Spirit, the more and more we begin to hate this way of life and we strive to put to death all the sin that is in us and all around us. Now, obviously I am not saying and God’s Word is not saying that once you become a Chritian, you stop sinning all together. The major difference here is that we hate the sin, and we fight to separate ourselves from it. This is a huge distinction from the rest of the world who again, only cares about their desires and not the Lord’s. On one hand, we hate when we sin, and we couldn’t feel more guilty for doing it. But on the other hand, we rejoice that there is a hate for something that displeases God that didn’t exist before we were saved. This holiness that we are called to is definitely challenging, but it is also absolutely rewarding when you notice it can only be brought about by God’s Spirit and it actually starts taking place inside of you.
Being Fools To The Lost
So we know that God says we should be holy and that this growth in holiness is proof of our sanctification, but is that all? Does being set apart from the rest of the world in any way actually show the rest of the world what we are all about. You bet it does. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 1:18 “For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” The world we know today views our faith as foolishness and the power of the gospel that we believe in as foolishness as well. However, this doesn’t change the fact that even to the lost, we appear to be set apart from them as well. Now I know you may be thinking, ‘That’s cool and all, but what does it matter how we live if everyone just thinks we’re being foolish?’ To that I would say, people are always prone to follow the crowd. I’m not saying that Christ followers are the majority anymore in this country, but if enough lost people come into contact with enough Christians that they think are foolish, it might just dawn on them one day that maybe there is something behind this whole Christian thing. If enough people do something that is repeatedly foolish in our eyes, we would begin to question if we are the ones who are misinformed on what this foolish thing actually is.
That must be our goal as we strive for holiness in this day and age. Yes, we may look like fools to the rest of the world as we seek to honor and glorify Christ through our living, but by God’s grace, maybe the lost can come into contact with just the right number of us that they may reconsider what their stance on this whole religion thing was in the first place. In fact, this was the point of our last series in loving our neighbor/enemies. We talked about how John 13:35 shows us that by our love, the world will know we are Christ’s disciples. As we continue our walks with the Lord and grow to be more like Christ, I pray that His Spirit would lead us to be more and more holy so that we may glorify God and affect the lost. I know it may seem hard to be constantly judged by the world for being set apart for God, but if you are being labeled a fool for what you believe, you are in good company.
Sources
[1] Blue Letter Bible. (n.d.). Blue Letter Bible. https://www.blueletterbible.org/
[2] The holiness of God. (n.d.). Grace to You. https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/GTY100/the-holiness-of-god
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