The Secret Place: 21 Day Devotional预览

HOLY MATTERS (PART 2)

Romans 12:1

In the Old Testament, the atonement of sin was the sacrifice of animals, the shedding of their blood as a covering for the people’s sins. This brought about an external representation of holiness with no internal change. The appearance of holiness but no holy living. With Christ, this changes. He is the sacrifice as His blood atones, once and for all, and in this work, He gives us the Holy Spirit as our helper that “leads us into all truth,” which is us being led to Christ himself. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is God’s declaration of our new identity - holy. With Christ, the order of things changes. Submission to God and His word enables the spirit to do the work in us, a heart operation if you will, which eventually is displayed as fruit. There’s another step, however, in this process of being holy. Just as we saw Christ being the sacrifice, we follow suit. The altar no longer accepts dead animals as the sacrifice - you and I are now the living sacrifice. Let’s revisit Isaiah 6. In these passages, the image of the Holy God makes the prophet aware of his uncleanness, or his unholiness. His response is “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”. When we fix our gaze on the holy, righteous God, we become aware of our own unrighteousness, our inability to do good on our own, and our need for and dependence on Christ.

John Calvin, a 16th-century theologian, says, “As long as our gaze is fixed on this world, on the horizontal plane of this earth, we have no problem with our self-images. We flatter ourselves and address ourselves as something only less than demigods until if for one second we lift our gaze to heaven and contemplate what kind of being God is”. When we keep reading, the Lord instructs the seraphim to touch the prophets lips with hot coals and declares to Isaiah that “his guilt is taken away, and his sin atoned for '. Although this represents a beautiful image of repentance and grace, it also speaks of the price of holiness. The coal was hot, too hot for even the angels to touch. In order for Isaiah to stand in the presence and experience God, he needed to be cleansed, or sanctified. This can be likened to our own journeys with Christ. “Blessed is the pure in heart, for they shall see God”. We must die to our flesh. To abuse grace is not to know what grace is. We have been given another chance to do better, to walk in holiness, to be like Christ. The price of holiness does not mean we pay for our salvation - we never could. Rather, it speaks of the fact that with our identity, we no longer live as slaves to our flesh but slaves to righteousness. This means we die daily to our flesh and desires that do not honour or glorify Christ, as God sanctifies us. We have given ourselves up for holy use, according to God’s will. Contrary to this, the world we live in is very much governed by our flesh. Our feelings and emotions have become gods, and this has made its way into the church, taking precedence over scripture and the voice of the Holy Spirit.

We need to do away with feel-good Christianity where our worship and devotion to God are dependent on feelings and circumstances. Truth is “feel good” Christianity isn’t enough to experience the fullness of God, neither is it enough for us to be able to stand in faith, especially in the times we are in. In our lack of pursuit of holiness, we rid ourselves of the opportunity to experience all that God has for us, for “without holiness, no one can see God”. Pursuing holiness is our worship; laying our lives down and everything we deem valuable, just like Christ did, is our worship. Remember, the standard of holy living is not you or I, it's Christ himself. In conclusion, “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22-24).

We’ve been called to be holy, so let’s walk holy.