Please forgive the length of this.
Holiness
Because we serve a holy God, we feel a deep need to be holy also, in order to have fellowship with Him. We know without being told that God will not fellowship with unholiness, that He will not look upon sin. The Holy Spirit who is in us makes us to know that He is much more holy than we can think, that the standard of holiness is perfect and absolute. And we live in these fleshly bodies of sin, in these tents which are corrupted and stained and dying. If we have the Spirit in us we know the travail of our spirit which is born of Him, and the desire and even the need to be holy for our God, and the conflict of our struggle with sin in this flesh. Our state is such that the Spirit must sustain our flesh which is dying because of sin, so that we might continue in this world.
Many of us have been instilled from youth with a bias to perform, a drive to excel, an inner need to meet a standard of expectation which is performance based. We are taught these things, we have had them trained into us from our parents and the adults who are over us as our guides. Many would call this a work ethic, but what it amounts to is a literal restraint that has been placed in our souls to make us into productive citizens in our society. As such, this need to perform is not necessarily evil, but we must realize that it is not an attribute of the new creatures we are in Christ Jesus, and that if we are allowing ourselves to be ruled by this we might have some troubles that we would otherwise not experience. One of these troubles is the striving to be holy by human effort.
If we believe, if we know what the Spirit has done to and in us, we know that our holiness is from above. Think about this. Our holiness is from above, not from us. We are holy by virtue of our birth into the family of God, and not by any other reason. God has loved us so much that He has chosen us as His children, and has given us new life in His Son, and has sealed us with the Spirit of adoption whereby we call Him "Dear Father!" This and this alone is the basis of our holiness. It is not of works, lest any should boast before God. All such boasting is of the spirit of the devil, who is so boastful that he will one day proclaim himself as God. The one who knows that he is born holy can rest, just as God has rested.
For it is evident that our efforts cannot produce holiness. Just as Jesus said, we cannot by our effort change the color of even one of the hairs on our head, so we cannot make ourselves into something we are not. Even so, we seem to be driven to be holy by some other means than faith, than resting in what He has done. We have this vision of God's holiness, and of our own darkness, and we seek to restrain the darkness, to make over the vision into a more acceptable man, to become in essence what we already are in Christ Jesus. We believe that if we have a perfect and pure understanding of scripture, if we perfectly abide by the Law, if we meet all of the commandments in the scripture, if we attend church without fail, and so many more things, that we will become more acceptable to God. One of the strongest of these false desires is to have doctrinal purity, and we even judge others by their doctrines, whether they are false doctrines or not, and thus whether they are a child of God or not.
Now not one of these things is evil in and of itself, but we must know that they do not make us more acceptable to God. Do we know this? Do we know that our acceptance by God is solely on the basis of our having received Christ Jesus into our lives as our Lord and Master by His Spirit, receiving Him as grace by faith? Do we understand that everything else, no matter what it might be, cannot make us acceptable to God, or even more acceptable? That indeed, if we persist in these things with the thought of becoming more acceptable, that they will eventually become the root of our unacceptability? The principal that is at work with the Law is also at work with these things. Just as the one who lives by the Law cannot live by faith, so the one who seeks holiness by these things will not have his true holiness which is by faith. Holiness is the work of God, not the work of man.
Now some would say that this leaves open the door to all kinds of sin and sinful behavior. They say that there must be restraint, by the Law, by decency, by correct moral beliefs and actions. But restraint is not freedom, but a form of slavery, which is opposed to faith. We have been set free! There is no restraint, only freedom to love God and each other even as He loves us. The most horrible thing about these restraining things we so often embrace is that we soon end up judging others by these very things which we are seeking to use to become more acceptable to God by, and in that day when we stand before Him, we will be judged by these very same things, rather than by the forgiveness that is in Christ Jesus. Read the scripture and see if this is not the teaching of Jesus our Lord.
It seems almost as if we are afraid to believe, to trust and to just rest in what has been done for us in the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus, by the Spirit as He indwells us. I am reminded of the time when Paul and those with him found a group of believers who had only believed in the baptism with water, but had never heard of the baptism with the Spirit. They laid hands on them and prayed that they receive the Spirit, even before they preached to them! We should see just how important the early church viewed the Spirit in the lives of believers, even that He is of primary importance, for by Him we have our life in Jesus with God. How many have been driven to the depths of darkness and despair by teachings which say that if you do this or that more perfectly, you will become more acceptable to God? How many could have been spared so much sorrow if we had only taught them to live in and by the Spirit?
That which is born of God does not sin, indeed it cannot sin, because His seed lives in it. Our spirits have been born again, of God! This new life which will never die is perfect and pure and holy, without sin. The seed that God has planted in us is of the perfect life of His Son, as He is now at the right hand of the throne of God. There is no higher holiness or acceptability with God that what we have right now in our birth by the Spirit. We know that this is true, because this is where the Spirit dwells, communing with our spirits, and we know that He will not commune with sin! Jesus said that He is the resurrection and the life. Here is a secret, a mystery that is hidden. Jesus said that everyone who believes in Him will live, even if He dies, and that everyone who lives and believes in Him will never die. The woman He told this to did not understand what He was saying, only believing that her brother would live again in the last day, at the resurrection. But Jesus is saying so much more with this statement. He is showing that there is a life available now, in this very moment, which has no end, which we can live by and in now and forever! Do we believe this?
Earlier He said that the hour is coming and has come, (showing that it is an eternal moment,) when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and that those who hear shall live. Have we heard the voice of the Son of God? If we are alive now, then we must have, for only those who have heard His voice are alive. Everyone else is already dead in their sins. Oh, they too will be resurrected, and judged according to their works, but those of us who are alive now in Him will never die. The faith that hears His voice is alive now forevermore, and the faith that believes but does not hear will live then, in the resurrection. We, on the other hand, live in that eternal moment of hearing His voice by grace through the Spirit by faith. The life we have if this is true is not ours, but His. How can we do anything to improve upon what He has provided? How could we be more acceptable to our God? How could we be more holy? Will anything we do make us better?
Yet there is something we must do. We must believe, and trust, and hold fast our confidence, not wavering in our belief that He has come to us and accepted us as His own, given to Him by His Father, and that He will never loose us or leave us or forsake us. We believe that we are alive in Him, perfect and pure and holy. We trust that He will be our life forever, and that He will keep us from all evil. And we hold fast to the confidence that we belong to Him, possessions of the Son of God. We know the state of our present bodies, and we hope in the day in which we will see Him, and become just as He is in our flesh, and this hope makes us pure, for we are hoping in that which He has done and will do for us, and not in what we can do. For this is the essence of purity, in that we do not mix what we can do with what God has done and is doing. We rest in His perfection. And so, what we do is present ourselves to God as vessels of holiness, that He might fill us with Himself, and that in this way the world would see and hear Him and believe. Oddly enough, this is the way that Jesus walked this earth, and it is the way that He commands us to walk in it for Him.
Holiness
Because we serve a holy God, we feel a deep need to be holy also, in order to have fellowship with Him. We know without being told that God will not fellowship with unholiness, that He will not look upon sin. The Holy Spirit who is in us makes us to know that He is much more holy than we can think, that the standard of holiness is perfect and absolute. And we live in these fleshly bodies of sin, in these tents which are corrupted and stained and dying. If we have the Spirit in us we know the travail of our spirit which is born of Him, and the desire and even the need to be holy for our God, and the conflict of our struggle with sin in this flesh. Our state is such that the Spirit must sustain our flesh which is dying because of sin, so that we might continue in this world.
Many of us have been instilled from youth with a bias to perform, a drive to excel, an inner need to meet a standard of expectation which is performance based. We are taught these things, we have had them trained into us from our parents and the adults who are over us as our guides. Many would call this a work ethic, but what it amounts to is a literal restraint that has been placed in our souls to make us into productive citizens in our society. As such, this need to perform is not necessarily evil, but we must realize that it is not an attribute of the new creatures we are in Christ Jesus, and that if we are allowing ourselves to be ruled by this we might have some troubles that we would otherwise not experience. One of these troubles is the striving to be holy by human effort.
If we believe, if we know what the Spirit has done to and in us, we know that our holiness is from above. Think about this. Our holiness is from above, not from us. We are holy by virtue of our birth into the family of God, and not by any other reason. God has loved us so much that He has chosen us as His children, and has given us new life in His Son, and has sealed us with the Spirit of adoption whereby we call Him "Dear Father!" This and this alone is the basis of our holiness. It is not of works, lest any should boast before God. All such boasting is of the spirit of the devil, who is so boastful that he will one day proclaim himself as God. The one who knows that he is born holy can rest, just as God has rested.
For it is evident that our efforts cannot produce holiness. Just as Jesus said, we cannot by our effort change the color of even one of the hairs on our head, so we cannot make ourselves into something we are not. Even so, we seem to be driven to be holy by some other means than faith, than resting in what He has done. We have this vision of God's holiness, and of our own darkness, and we seek to restrain the darkness, to make over the vision into a more acceptable man, to become in essence what we already are in Christ Jesus. We believe that if we have a perfect and pure understanding of scripture, if we perfectly abide by the Law, if we meet all of the commandments in the scripture, if we attend church without fail, and so many more things, that we will become more acceptable to God. One of the strongest of these false desires is to have doctrinal purity, and we even judge others by their doctrines, whether they are false doctrines or not, and thus whether they are a child of God or not.
Now not one of these things is evil in and of itself, but we must know that they do not make us more acceptable to God. Do we know this? Do we know that our acceptance by God is solely on the basis of our having received Christ Jesus into our lives as our Lord and Master by His Spirit, receiving Him as grace by faith? Do we understand that everything else, no matter what it might be, cannot make us acceptable to God, or even more acceptable? That indeed, if we persist in these things with the thought of becoming more acceptable, that they will eventually become the root of our unacceptability? The principal that is at work with the Law is also at work with these things. Just as the one who lives by the Law cannot live by faith, so the one who seeks holiness by these things will not have his true holiness which is by faith. Holiness is the work of God, not the work of man.
Now some would say that this leaves open the door to all kinds of sin and sinful behavior. They say that there must be restraint, by the Law, by decency, by correct moral beliefs and actions. But restraint is not freedom, but a form of slavery, which is opposed to faith. We have been set free! There is no restraint, only freedom to love God and each other even as He loves us. The most horrible thing about these restraining things we so often embrace is that we soon end up judging others by these very things which we are seeking to use to become more acceptable to God by, and in that day when we stand before Him, we will be judged by these very same things, rather than by the forgiveness that is in Christ Jesus. Read the scripture and see if this is not the teaching of Jesus our Lord.
It seems almost as if we are afraid to believe, to trust and to just rest in what has been done for us in the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus, by the Spirit as He indwells us. I am reminded of the time when Paul and those with him found a group of believers who had only believed in the baptism with water, but had never heard of the baptism with the Spirit. They laid hands on them and prayed that they receive the Spirit, even before they preached to them! We should see just how important the early church viewed the Spirit in the lives of believers, even that He is of primary importance, for by Him we have our life in Jesus with God. How many have been driven to the depths of darkness and despair by teachings which say that if you do this or that more perfectly, you will become more acceptable to God? How many could have been spared so much sorrow if we had only taught them to live in and by the Spirit?
That which is born of God does not sin, indeed it cannot sin, because His seed lives in it. Our spirits have been born again, of God! This new life which will never die is perfect and pure and holy, without sin. The seed that God has planted in us is of the perfect life of His Son, as He is now at the right hand of the throne of God. There is no higher holiness or acceptability with God that what we have right now in our birth by the Spirit. We know that this is true, because this is where the Spirit dwells, communing with our spirits, and we know that He will not commune with sin! Jesus said that He is the resurrection and the life. Here is a secret, a mystery that is hidden. Jesus said that everyone who believes in Him will live, even if He dies, and that everyone who lives and believes in Him will never die. The woman He told this to did not understand what He was saying, only believing that her brother would live again in the last day, at the resurrection. But Jesus is saying so much more with this statement. He is showing that there is a life available now, in this very moment, which has no end, which we can live by and in now and forever! Do we believe this?
Earlier He said that the hour is coming and has come, (showing that it is an eternal moment,) when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and that those who hear shall live. Have we heard the voice of the Son of God? If we are alive now, then we must have, for only those who have heard His voice are alive. Everyone else is already dead in their sins. Oh, they too will be resurrected, and judged according to their works, but those of us who are alive now in Him will never die. The faith that hears His voice is alive now forevermore, and the faith that believes but does not hear will live then, in the resurrection. We, on the other hand, live in that eternal moment of hearing His voice by grace through the Spirit by faith. The life we have if this is true is not ours, but His. How can we do anything to improve upon what He has provided? How could we be more acceptable to our God? How could we be more holy? Will anything we do make us better?
Yet there is something we must do. We must believe, and trust, and hold fast our confidence, not wavering in our belief that He has come to us and accepted us as His own, given to Him by His Father, and that He will never loose us or leave us or forsake us. We believe that we are alive in Him, perfect and pure and holy. We trust that He will be our life forever, and that He will keep us from all evil. And we hold fast to the confidence that we belong to Him, possessions of the Son of God. We know the state of our present bodies, and we hope in the day in which we will see Him, and become just as He is in our flesh, and this hope makes us pure, for we are hoping in that which He has done and will do for us, and not in what we can do. For this is the essence of purity, in that we do not mix what we can do with what God has done and is doing. We rest in His perfection. And so, what we do is present ourselves to God as vessels of holiness, that He might fill us with Himself, and that in this way the world would see and hear Him and believe. Oddly enough, this is the way that Jesus walked this earth, and it is the way that He commands us to walk in it for Him.
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