God’s Holy Standard

God is holy.  You and I are not.  We all need to face our battle with sin, the Flesh, and Satan because God is holy and cannot condone sin.

       Let me ask you a quick question.  What do you think of when you think of holiness?

     Do you think of things like: no sex, living in a monastery cell all along, eating bread and water, miserable sadness, judgmental, no fun, a hermit living in the desert, …

     How about great joy?  Or peace in the most difficult circumstances?  How about love, and acceptance and power?

     Or great love, healing of painful memories, being loved and being able to love others as never imagined?

     The real definition of holiness is love - great joyful healing love.  Love that is beyond imagination.  Not love like the world knows, but love like everyone needs and longs for but cannot find.  Holiness is wholeness, and hope.   

     We all hunger for the holy.  We wish it were true.  The world victimizes us.  People hurt us.  Those who are most supposed to love us hurt us instead.  We deny.  We build a wall around us.  We hurt others in return. We suffer.  We drown our pain in alcohol, or the pursuit of sex, or the drive for power.  When we get them, we find ourselves hungrier and lost.    

     Most people when they think of holiness they think that it is impossible.  It is not for them.  Maybe for somebody else.  But not for them.  Because they have been deeply hurt by others.  Because acceptance only comes from being corrupt in the world.  Because maybe they even tried to be good, and to follow what the priest had said, but then found out that they did not make it.  Then they found out that the pastor did not make it either.   

     The average Christian thinks that in this world what God wants is impossible.  We can never do it.  So we make excuses like these: "Nobody is perfect."; "That’s not my gift."; "That’s not the way we do it.";"Judge not." and more.  

      Sometimes we reduce what God want us to do, to what we can do ourselves, without God’s help.  Often this means we make our own rules of Christian-acceptable behavior.  Depending on the group these can be things like, don’t dance, don’t go to movies, no make up, don’t drink, don’t smoke.  Then because we can do some of these we say that we are holy.

     Often we live with guilt.  Even more often we just give up.  Churches are full of people who have given up.  The go through the actions of being in Church, but they have given up hope of joy, and holy love, and peace, and fruitfulness in this world.

     Another thing we do is put up a front, like a Potemkin Village of fake houses and buildings to make us look like we are something we are not.  Theology is one of these.  We meet each other through teaching and communication, brain-to-brain.  But it is not holy love.  We build our goodness on being theologically correct, on being right, or more right than those from another branch of the Body of Christ.

            Holiness is love.  Great love.  It is love for God and love for your neighbor.

     This kind of holiness is available to you, right now.  It is not about what church we belong to.  It is not about our education, or where we live, or what language we speak.  It is about love.

            God is holy.  He shows us what holiness is really like

     God also made us to be holy.  We are to be pure as God tells us to pure in the Bible.