God Will Get Holiness

The Christian life would have quite a few less bumps and bruises if we would realize just one simple truth: God will get holiness from us. It is an undeniable biblical truth. He will get it, and He will get it from us.

When we are born from above into new life, God commits Himself to the process of making us perfectly holy (as C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity). Whether we bargain for it or now, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we want it or not, God obligates Himself to the task of making us perfectly holy. We are declared holy when we are born from above, but we are made holy through this process over the rest of our lives on earth. (This is the classic distinction between justification and sanctification.)

That means that God, being God, will get what He wants. And what He wants from us is perfect holiness. So, that's exactly what He's going to get. Since He commits Himself to the process, we know it will not fail.

When we work against this process, we get the bumps and bruises. When we make decisions that are contrary to the process God has unfailingly committed Himself to, we are going to get bruised up, because we will be constantly banging into the unshakable process of God.

It's not a question of if God will get holiness from you, but how. He gives us choices on the how part of the process. If we welcome God's work in our lives to identify, raise, expose, and make us face our sin so that He can work it out of us, then we are cooperating with His process. If we deny our sin, or resist God's process of showing us our sin, or refuse to let Him work freely to work that sin out of us, we are working against the process. But the process will succeed, with our without our help.

Whenever someone discovers something ugly about themselves that they want to ignore, I say that they are blessed, because God has chosen this particular time to bring up this issue that has been part of that sinful mess for years. Right then is the time that God wants to work that out of us. God is at work! It may be uncomfortable, but it's more comfortable than constantly banging up against God's unstoppable process!

Give God free reign. When He exposes your sin, don't try to hide or pretend it's not there. Thank God for showing it to you so that it can be dealt with. And then work alongside God in dealing with it.

You'll have a whole lot fewer bruises that way.