Set Apart to Serve Himনমুনা

Day 3 – Holiness isn't a choice, it's an order! 

REFERENCE VERSES:

1 Peter 1:15-16

15 But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; 

16 for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.” 

REFLECTIONS:

Read 1 Peter 1:15-16 and take a moment to respond to the following questions:

➤ Why does God give such an order? 

➤ How do we recognise a fake holiness which doesn’t honour God and what are its characteristics?

CONTENT:

Do you understand that you will go to heaven and spend eternity with God only because you have placed your trust in Jesus? And because one day you said a prayer of repentance, that guarantees forever that you have received salvation. However, we need to consider that this can lead some people to live a double life, giving off the image of a “good Christian” at a church and having a “normal” life the rest of the time. In reality, this is quite an uncomfortable position because we aren’t good in either situation…

Not only that, it isn’t possible to live like this and to pretend to have an assurance of salvation because the Bible declares that without sanctification, no one can see the Lord (cf. Hebrews 12:14). The assurance of salvation is an internal certificate of the Holy Spirit in us; the measure where the start of our Christian life is a profound conversion, displayed by a real separation of the sin in our lives. On the other hand, Jesus doesn’t have two personalities, He isn’t the Saviour for some people and the Lord for others, according to what they have chosen to obey. He is both our Saviour and Lord at the same time. We cannot pretend to meet Saviour Jesus without being confronted with His lordship, and to see Him transform our lives.

God always gives us free choice, however we do have a choice to make; either to love God and to follow Him, or to live our lives according to our own criteria and desires. Even when we are filled with the Holy Spirit and assured of God’s forgiveness, we need to stay alert in regards to sin so that we don’t deceive ourselves by thinking something along the lines of, “It’s incredible, I can sin and keep my faith,” because sin is very insidious. It starts out like a small seed, but sooner or later, it grows and catches up with us and destroys us if we don’t know how to confess it and abandon it.

Sin often starts with something simple and small. In Joshua 7:21 Achan perfectly describes the path that lead him to sin when he says, “I SAW…then I WANTED and I TOOK”, and this led to his death. In the same way, sins leads us to death if we don’t repent. That is why God gave us this order to set ourselves apart, that is to purify ourselves. Sin interferes with what we see or think. We can’t prevent ourselves from seeing or thinking certain things, which leads to temptation. Until then, there still isn’t sin, temptation is not a sin; even Jesus was tempted (cf. Luke 4:2). However Jesus never committed a sin. It is our way of dealing with temptation that can produce sin.

Our responsibility is to obey God’s order to be holy by choosing to reject all thoughts and images that prevent us from setting ourselves apart for God. Therefore we mustn’t cultivate or feed these things, know how to look the other direction, refuse to covet and envy in order to find fullness in God’s presence. Jesus won against temptation by quoting the Word of God, let’s act in the same way. For example, to overcome coveting, we can simply quote Colossians 2:10 which states that we have everything fully in Christ. And so, if without Him, we have nothing and He is the source of everything, we don’t have to preoccupy ourselves with that. Or we can quote Matthew 6:33 to affirm our decision to seek the kingdom of God above all else, which is our priority, knowing that everything else is provided for by Christ.

The Lord gives us an order; “Be holy as I am holy”. What is our response going to be? Take time to pray to position yourself before God.

MY DECISION:

➤ What I have understood for my own personal life.

➤ What I am deciding to do in my life based upon what I have just learnt. 

➤ What you decide to do today will determine who and what you will be tomorrow!

FOOTER:

Adapted from "un disciple en marche" copyright 2018 by Luc Favre, published by Vie Victorieuse.  All rights reserved.