Consecrate to Holiness

Heb. 12:14 “Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord:”

A third area the Lord impressed on me the Church need to be consecrated to is Holiness!  Having grown up in a “holiness” environment where the emphasis was legalism that dealt mostly with dress and hair length, I understand how some resist the notion of holiness.

However holiness is initially and essentially an inner working of the Spirit of God in the lives of the believers.  God provides grace, not to live as we want or feel, but to live as we should.  Because His grace is “enabling power” to walk in holiness.  It’s His grace that empowers us to walk in the command to “be holy as I am holy” (1Peter 1:16).  God would never give a command for something that would be impossible for us to do.  His enabling power, grace, does that for us as we yield to His Spirit.

A penetrating thought concerning our verse speaks is “without which (holiness) no one will see the Lord”.   It’s appropriate to personalize this, yet holiness is active in evangelism as well.  If our lives are no different than the world’s what attracts them to a Holy God?  When we hunger and thirst for righteous, holy lives and the world witnesses, not some weird dress code or hair style but biblical, scriptural, spiritual holiness it’s an attraction not to us but to Almighty God.

Let us be consecrate to being holy as He has enabled us to be holy people!