When you think of someone who is “holy”, what comes to mind? Is it a perfect person who lives a completely spotless life, someone spending every waking moment in prayer and Scripture? Someone who has devoted their entire life to helping the sick and poor in God’s name? Someone who’s given every penny they own to the church? The word has such weighty connotations it’s easy to consider anything “holy” to be unnatural in this broken world – but the reality is simpler. Coming from a Hebrew term for separation, holiness is a quality denoted to anything or anyone set apart as separate from normality. Only God is perfectly holy – separated completely from sin and anything imperfect. Nothing and no one is like God; free of fault, perfectly just, and wise beyond our understanding. Only God Most High is holy in every single aspect, but anything, from place to artifact to person, that has been recognized by God as special and not entirely of this world could be considered holy in some aspect.
Importantly, we should think of ourselves as holy. As Christians, our faith should ideally guarantee our wholehearted pursuit of holiness. But human nature is sinful and broken, and of course we have trouble committing to spiritual purity and connection with God on our own accord. Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross accomplishes with a totality we aren’t capable of achieving. It makes overcoming sin, separating yourself from the ways of the world, and forming that resulting personal connection with God a possibility. As 1 Corinthians 1:30 says, “because of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” From Jesus’s death we have been made clean, redeemed and set right, and in His resurrection, the sting of death has been eradicated and our sanctification has been made eternal.
In 1 Peter 1:16, the apostle Peter references God’s commands in Leviticus 20:26: “you shall be holy, for I am holy.” Last weekend, we celebrated Jesus’s victory over death that guaranteed our sanctification. Now that we are free to follow God’s commands, how has this verse, this call to be holy, been reflected in your own life? How have you lived differently this week in response to the call of Easter Sunday? How have you acted on God’s word and acted in the same righteous, generous, and blameless manner that we have been commanded? Think about the ways you’ve embodied holiness this week. Maybe you’ve consciously treated others more kindly when it did not come easily. Maybe you went out of your way to show generosity towards a family member or friend in need, offering help purely as its own reward. Perhaps when your old sinful habits and urges crept into your consciousness, you turned heavenward to the Redeemer instead of inward to your own self-gratification.
However you have felt changed, whatever form Jesus’s purchase of your sanctification took, it pleases God and makes you further set apart from sin: more holy, more like His example. The Lord delights in the kindness, justice, and righteousness we display, taken from His example. And of course, to further follow the Lord’s example is to further learn how to be more like the holy God we serve. I pray in the meantime for this pure holiness be revealed to you through God’s word and through the changes He makes in your life. It is not easy for people in this world to turn away from the sin that permeates it, to consciously separate themselves from its ways, but anything is possible for our holy God.