A Goodie from the Devo-file: God is righteous

“Because God is righteous, I will live by His standards.”–Bill Bright

“Be holy, because I am holy.” Whoa! Can I get a “Try to be…”, “Work on being…”, or maybe “It would be nice if you’d be…”? But in the words of that spiritual guru Yoda, “There is do or do not. There is no try.” Three times in Leviticus (11:44, 19:2, 20:7) God tells Moses to tell the Israelites (and us) to be holy. That’s some standard to live up to!

We need not kid ourselves. The various laws given to Moses at Sinai are enough to show us that we can never keep up the purity God commands, much less the holiness He is by nature. Then Jesus has to go and extend the scope of the rules in Matthew 5:17-48 to make it totally impossible for us to do!

Exactly! WE can’t do it–only God can. (That’s why He’s God and we’re not!) Thus we must call upon Him to overcome ourselves, to create the holiness that He requires in us. “Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (I Peter 1:13)

So here are the three steps to holiness:
1) “prepare your mind”–We need to realize that holiness is God’s desire for us and our gift to Him.
2) “be self-controlled”–We must exert our conscious and Spirit-given strength toward the task of living up the standards and commands of God. “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance.” (I Peter 1:14)
3) “set your hope fully on the grace”–We need to realize that our strength, our power will never produce the holiness in us. Ultimately we must rest in God’s grace to work through us and to overcome our inability.

“Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.” (I Peter 1:22) Holiness is not Corban (see Mark 7:11), being set apart and kept away from everyone else. Holiness is about living amid the filth, but not becoming dirty yourself. Jesus lived among the sinners, but didn’t sin Himself.

Too often we try to hide behind new Temple veils; we try to cut off all outside, secular influence in our lives in our Christian cultural ghetto. But it’s time we become more Immanuel: God with us, God among us! This is what Jesus was teaching in the Great Commandments: Loving God is inseparable from loving people. Being a holy people means being a holy people among an unholy people. Being a light to the darkness means you got to get down off the lampstand and go into the darkness!

Holiness is hard. It is made harder by having to live it in a sinful and corrupted world. That was the mission of Christ, a mission that required His life, both in time and even to death. It should require nothing less of us as well.

A Goodie from the Devo-file: God is truth

Sorry it took me a little while to update: too much going on right before Thanksgiving!

+++++++

“Because God is absolute truth, I will believe what He says and live accordingly.”–Bill Bright

If you study world religions, you find a somewhat common trend to them: they have often been sanitized in their depictions of their founders and their truths. Often the great thinkers of a certain philosophy will be deified. The rituals and mysticism is retro-fitted so that it all so nicely explained. However, this is not the case with Christianity.

God represents Himself in the Scriptures in often very confusing ways. Much ballyhoo has been made about how “contradictory” and “cryptic” some passages seem. But this should make us think: If we were able to fully understand God and His ways, what would then separate us from being just like Him, from becoming equal to Him? I like my God to be a little mysterious, a little unknowable, a little too big for me.

Also many of the sacred texts of the various world religions were written many decades, even centuries, after their founding. But the Bible has not only been historically verified by ancient manuscripts, it also speaks to its own aunthenticity. I Corinthians 15:6 speaks of five hundred witnesses to the resurrection of Christ (possibly the Bible’s most extreme claim), most of whom were still alive at its writing. If that many people, who could have been interviewed and their stories verified, did not reject at that time the truths the apostles taught, then logic dictates that we must give biblical scripture its factual due.

Finally, the Bible does little to white-wash or clean up the image of its characters. In fact, it takes great effort to expose the flaws, sins, and failings of its most beloved stories! It almost dares the reader to say, “So why am I trying to emulate these people? They’re no better than me.” EXACTLY! The Bible’s power resides in its applicability even to us, in its reality and its message to everyone across time.

My challenge for you is to consider the significance of the truth that the Bible represents. There are many uncomfortable things the Bible has to say to us. There are passages that, like Thomas Jefferson, we would prefer to just cut out. Instead bump up against the rough edges, the hard places. Take God to task about them: yell, scream, hit, whatever! Just don’t deny their truth or their power from that truth.

A Goodie from the Devo-file: God is holy

“Because God is holy, I will devote myself to Him in purity, worship and service.”–Bill Bright

I will admit that I was somewhat stuck when I first looked at this attribute of God. How can I start to talk about, much less completely explain this concept? So in classic “preacher behavior”, I am going to distract you with Greek! There are three Greek words that we translate as “holy”. Each mean a slightly different kind of holiness.

Most New Testament references use the word hagios, meaning purity from defilement. This indicates that holiness in our sin-tainted world requires a “setting apart” of something. In Old Testament times, this was viewed through the lens of ritual and law. After the Crucifixion, this was viewed through the dedication of one’s desires and life to God’s Will.

Hieros, meaning formally consecrated, occurs twice in the New Testament, in I Corinthians 9:13 and II Timothy 3:15. In both places, the idea of separation is made more distinctly as both ministers and Scripture are viewed, at least from our human persepctive, as different from other callings or writings.

Finally is the word hosios, meaning right by intrinsic divine character, which is different from innocent in human terms (dikaios). This word for holiness is most important in our understanding because it is the term used for describing Christ in prophecy (in Acts 2:27 and 13:35, which are quotes of Psalm 16:10), in his role as Savior (Hebrews 7:26), and of His very nature (Revelation 15:4). Also hosios is used to describe how we should worship (I Timothy 2:8) and serve the church (Titus 1:8).

If the stories of the Old Testament teach us nothing else, they show us that our human effort is incomplete to achieve holiness. No set of laws or elaborate rituals is going to cleanse us of our sin nature other than the salvation that comes through Christ and His blood. Then when we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit as our Guide, we are transformed into this “intrinsic divine character” that hosios speaks of.

I encourage you this week to read over the passages I have listed, to fully wrap your brain around them, and to immerse yourself in their meaning. God desires purity in our worship and our service. He desires purity in our lives. He enables us to achieve this holiness through His holiness. Consider this mystery this week.