Holiness Is Not Optional

“So what?” God is transcendent; God is holy. Now what? Like any attribute of God, they are not taught in the Scriptures for mere intellectual understanding; they are meant for our sanctification.

The answer to the “so what” question is quite simple really. Just ask Peter – “(Be separated or cut away from those sins.) (I Pet 1:13-16). If God is holy, so should we be. Holiness is not optional.

To live a holy life separates us from the rest of the world. Paul told Timothy, “… ” (II Tim 2:19). If you profess the name of Christ, you prove the validity of your claim with a simple test: are you holy?

We are to be saints. In the early church, that’s what Christians were called (means “holy ones”). Unfortunately, the Roman Catholic Church has hijacked the term and ascribed it to characters who are special heroes and performed miracles. Saints are any one who is or was holy.

I have often wondered how many of us would pass a holiness test if we got a stranger off the street, invited them to follow us the next seven days, get inside our thinking, listen to our speech, watch us make decisions, etc. Would they conclude at the end of the week with an affirmation of our holiness? Or would they respond with shock that we claim to be saints?

Holiness cannot be faked. Holiness is lived out sincerely and rightly before God. As J.C. Ryle rights in his classical work ,

“True holiness, we surely ought to remember, does not consist merely of inward sensations and impressions. It is much more than tears, and sighs, and bodily excitement, and a quickened pulse, and a passionate feeling of attachment to our own favorite preacher and our own religious party, and a readiness to quarrel with everyone who does not agree with us. It is something of ‘the image of Christ,’ which can be seen and observed by others in our private life, and habits, and character, and doings.”

You know, we have millions of Bibles in America (thirteen on my shelves alone). We have churches all over the globe (around 3.7 million Christian churches). We have countless religious organizations and para-church ministries. We have thousands of educational institutions (Christian schools, colleges, seminaries). We have Christian publishers in almost every major city. We have endless supplies of Sunday school materials. We have quite of bit in terms of being equipped.

What don’t we have? I will tell you what we don’t have enough of. We don’t have enough holy people. We don’t have enough professing Christians who live lives cut away from the world. All too often we don’t have what the saints in the Bible had. As A.W. Tozer warns, the church talks more than any other institution in the world and has the most raw material to change, and yet rarely does anything.

Source unknown.