If being holy is what sets God apart or separated from me, than a desire to be close to Him will at the same time mean a desire to be holy--to be set apart from all that was separating me from Him. But knowing This means knowing the fullest Union means to be perfectly holy, just as He is-- an impossibility for me until I realize I have access into perfect holiness in Christ!
"My people's greatest need is...my personal holiness"
-Robert Murray McCheyne
Personal holiness is personal closeness to God. Intimacy with God can't be wishful thinking, it must be genuine...this happens in terrifying honesty. To be naked before God, as two loves join together in nakedness makes them one.
Holiness is too often looked at as external actions like mission trips, clothing the poor, or saying encouraging and uplifting words.
If those are what constitute holiness then the demons can be holy as well. They can do this or go there or speak this and that.
No. Holiness is a character of a person, Holy-ness is the person of God, Holy Spirit.
We have holiness when we have the Holy Spirit.
You can show or speak convincing holiness yet not have The Holy Spirit, but you cannot have the Holy Spirit and not have holiness. It's illogical and foolishness.
To say you have the Holy Spirit of God in you and yet not be holy is incongruent. Probably heretical. Haha...*uneasy laughter here.
The point is, holiness is closeness to God, because it is separating or set apartness from anything not God. There are only two directions. Toward God or away from Him.
Holy Spirit is literally God in us! That's mighty close if you ask me! When the Holy Spirit and a given to us we are close to God, we desire Him, we want to know Him, we are literally obsessed with Him. Because we are one with Him, a union of love.
So the more you desire God, the more you know you have the Holy Spirit. Stop judging your holiness based on what you do! That could be phony! What the body of Christ (the church) needs most is our personal holiness.
When you sin do you feel miserable, genuinely distorting miserable because you know God hates that? That's Holiness!!!
The more we see ourselves, our true selves with the turning on of light (illumination light bulb that the Holy Spirit does upon entrance) revealing our darkest depraved caverns in our innermost hearts, the more we can repent (turn away from what separates us from our God, loving Abba who is the best person to be loved by and to know and be with all the time!)
That is why grace, in this sense, works in a downward shift. By downward I mean, grace floods and ravishes your very real soul to God in the pit of your most perverse and disgustingly shameful acts of sin.
It's no wonder we are so afraid of truth-telling! If truth telling means entering THAT place, that's terrifying!
So what hope do we have to squash our fears of that dreadful place?
Holiness.
The hope that we will find God there at the very rock musty bottom with some kind of glimmering contraption ready to rocket us out and back home. The trip down is the trip home. That's what I mean by downward grace.
The more we traverse into our innermost hearts with the Holy Spirit, spurning our hope of holiness (or closeness with God) the sweeter His grace becomes. So sweet in the face of so much of our crimes against God.
See it, and let grace take you on wings to the one who bore all of those filthy sins in your nasty heart of hearts.
You have been given a new heart. The old one is now powerless and dead. You needn't fear it. This is a world of old dead hearts, including yours, but we know the outcome in Christ.
Allow the Holy Spirit to lead you into holiness= closeness to God.
Hallelujah! There's nothing wrong with me after all! Because I rarely "feel good" as in those good vibes of independent productivity. (For lack of a better description) However, I feel loved. In fact, I feel so loved that I would rather feel loved than feel good, I would rather be loved than be happy. I choose the superior way: Love.
Dearly, supremely loved,
Jmegrey
PS: haha immediately after posting this I felt the joy AND THE simultaneous pull of fear for all the desires or loss of comforts and security I might lose or what not if I Really believed everything I wrote above. I turn inward and thus I turn tiny as I hear myself timidly: "You'll take care of me, right? You would take care of me if I lost my home or my family? You would provide if I lost something? If I lose my self in You, I will gain everything, right?"
Man. God's love is that powerful.
His love becomes my everything.
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