The Beauty of Holiness

It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God.

1 Thessalonians 4:3-5

A lot of people have very confused ideas about what constitutes sanctification. Some think it is a kind of religious sheep dip, an experience of cleansing and commitment entered into once for all. Once they have been dipped, everything is fine. Others think sanctification is an extraction process. God uses a kind of magnet to extract all the sin, and from then on they can live to please him. Some people actually think they have not sinned for years. Obviously, nobody has told them the truth yet. Deeper investigation would reveal how wrong they are.

Actually, the word sanctification is almost the same as the word translated holiness. It comes from the same root. When I was younger, most people thought of holiness as grimness. I did not like holy people. They looked like they had been soaked in embalming fluid, grim and dull; they frowned on anything fun or pleasurable. But that is not holiness. I like the good English word wholeness, which also derives from the same root. Everybody wants to be a whole person. The Old Testament speaks about the beauty of holiness, the inner attractiveness apparent when someone begins to function inwardly as he or she was intended.

The second thing Paul says about such wholeness is that it includes moral purity. You cannot be a whole person if you indulge in sexual immorality. Let me put it plainly: morality means no sexual wrongdoing. No pre-marital sex or extra-marital sex; no homosexual sex; no pornography. These things destroy the wholeness that both you and God want. There is nothing more beautiful than a young person who has his or her life in order. At times I have been saddened to watch beautiful young men and women, raised in godly homes, who reflect moral beauty in their lives, but they begin to let their standards go when they get out into the world. Watch them a year or two later and you will see the hardness in their faces. Things have begun to drift. There is a downward slant to life. They are beginning to lose the beauty of wholeness that God has in mind.

In this day in which we live, many think that it is too late; they already have messed up their lives. But the glory of the gospel is that the word is not that we must never do this; rather the word is, Do it no longer. That is what you find all through these passages. Let us live no longer for ourselves but for Him who loved us (Romans 8:37) and gave himself for us. All of us have messed up our lives in one way or another; we have destroyed the wholeness. But the glory of the good news is that in coming to Jesus, through his work on the cross on our behalf, he can actually give us a new start. All the past is wiped out and forgiven. We are restored. If we acknowledge that we have done wrong and accept God's forgiveness through Christ, we are a chaste virgin again in Christ. What glorious good news that is!

Lord, I desire to be holy, not in a grim sort of way, but in a way that reflects the beauty of your own character.