Be ye Holy!
The writer of Hebrews provides the consequence of failing to pursue holiness. “Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness— without it no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14).
But before throwing passages about holiness your way and challenging you to obey, it is doubly necessary to first establish what must happen in us before we are even able to be holy ourselves. The agent of this amazing work is the Holy Spirit. To neglect Him in any discussion about sanctification, which is, being made holy, is to venture off into a land Scripture has not led you to and a land that Scripture beckons you to flee from. Without the Holy Spirit, any hope of being holy, like God, is futile. Notice that I said sanctification is “being made holy” not, “making ourselves holy.” This is mainly because of how people are described before the Holy Spirit does His work; the description is sobering. The language is unflattering, if anything, and intentionally horrific. Scripture refers to us as lovers of darkness, children of wrath with hearts of stone (Ezekiel 36:26; John 3:19; Ephesians 2:3). It sounds like a movie, and one of the scariest ones at that, with invisible footprints and voices coming from the walls.
Let us use our inventive minds for a minute and imagine that someone with more sense than a zombie went up to a body, a dead one, with nothing but good intentions for it. In a tone not too authoritative to seem rude but strong enough to signify its importance they say, “Live!” They watch the body, the toes, waiting for a twitch, something. Noticing that nothing has changed, the body is still cold, motionless, they try for a second time, but this time around they use another word: “Feel!” And then another, “Think!” As an observer, we would suppose that the living one has gone mad. “Don’t they know the person is dead? Don’t they see that the only thing a dead body can do is nothing?” It seems obvious enough, but does it not surprise you that this scenario describes us when we try to be holy apart from the resurrection power of the Holy Spirit?
It is not purely because of ignorance that we will not instinctively flee to God for forgiveness, but blindness. As our hearts are, our minds too, both darkened and incapable of functioning correctly or behaving righteously (Romans 1:21). We already have too many dead people dressing themselves up in clean linen and memorizing the language of the living for fun. We are prone to look at God’s law with strange self-confidence, an inner assurance or ego that exaggerates our own abilities, produced by none other than the flesh. The spirit of our age is to work endlessly, excel at everything, and rest never- and we bring that into our quest for holiness.
We look for human methods for maturity, a step-by-step guide to holiness, a natural way to be heavenly, our motivations are sadly mistaken. In them, we feel that we can work for holiness when the God-sent prerequisite to our sanctification simply begins with “believe in the one he has sent “(John 6:29).
Our relationship with God is broken, our relationship with each other is broken, and our relationship within ourselves is broken… so to be anything like God, we need help that is outside of ourselves. Help that is from a person whose relationship with God is not broken, that person is Jesus.
So let us be clear in this, we have no power in and of ourselves to do what God has required of us. No matter how confident we are or orthodox we think, a power that is independent of us must transform us from the inside out. We must be made alive before we can be made holy. To be alive, my friend, one must be born again. Just as a dead body cannot do anything, a dead nature cannot be holy. The heart is our moral center or the place from which all our actions have a root, and so a “stony heart,” as Scriptures puts it, is what prevents us from being like God.
Just as faith comes by hearing the Word of God, it is the Holy Spirit that works in us to produce holiness, through Whom we can then be able to yield obedience to God. As we yield, sanctification happens through his work continuously, being made holy in the likeness of the One Who commands us; Be ye holy!
