Vital: Holy People Volume 1

Ideal Holiness

In the church, there are always two things at work: The way things should be and the way things are.

Such is the case with the biblical truth of holiness. There’s ideal holiness, but lets be real. To what extent can we expect to experience holiness of life, mind, motive, thought, and action? To answer that question, we need to “learn not on our own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). There will always be the tension between biblical ideals and our lived experience, but Jesus came to demonstrate the ideal. Jesus points us in the direction of ideal, and His very life reflected the possibility that holiness could be fully operative in the human experience.

However, there are barriers at work within us, keeping us from realizing the full potential of ideal holiness.One such obstacle is desire. Do we tend to pursue things for which we have little or no desire? Do we view things we don’t care for by investing a great deal of our time, effort, thoughts and resources on them? Of course not. To desire ideal holiness requires a spiritual hunger. In the reality, can we expect that hunger? Where do we get that hunger and thirst?

Holiness can and should be pursued individually. However, in the church, Jesus’ ideal is to have holy people. Pursuing it together helps cultivate the sparks of hunger and thirst that will both initiate and sustain our passion for being like our Lord and King.