holiness

I need not adapt in certain ways. I am in fact but a visitor to this world, an ephemeral gasp within its long, tired history, and, before anything else, a follower of Christ. By this alone I have the power not to shuffle away from the Faith, the power to break loose from these marching-shackles of ongoing cultural and political pretense.

It is more important to be than to do, for if I am what God wants me to be, then I will do what He wants me to do. If I try to promote a program, however well-meaning, without personal holiness, it will be tainted by the defects of my life. It may lack the direction of full knowledge of the Word, or the discernment of maturity, or the direction that comes through unclouded fellowship with the Lord. Primarily we do not need to develop programs, but people.

What I want to tell you as you read these stories is that I both found and lost God a hundred times over. In fact, maybe I've never actually found God at all, but imagining that I have indeed found something so much larger and more beautiful than I can explain is more often enough for me.

Holiness in the purest form is independent of all textual doctrines, all churches and all institutions.

Seek your higher life, the holy heavenly living.

The heroes of faith in Hebrews 11 ... obeyed by faith ... obedience is the pathway to holiness ... no one will become holy apart from a life of faith. Faith enables us to claim the promises of God, but it also enables us to obey the commands of God.

The creation of man is evidence for the love of God, the preservation of man is evidence for the patience of God, and Christ is evidence for the forgiveness of God. It is when we are wrapped up in our own little peeves that we begin to displace His benevolence with malevolence.

We must be careful to let the Holy Spirit do this searching. If we try to search our own hearts, we are apt to fall into one or both of two traps. The first is the trap of morbid introspection. Introspection can easily become the tool of Satan, who is called the "accuser" (Revelation 12:10). One of his chief weapons is discouragement. He knows that if he can make us discouraged and dispirited, we will not fight the battle for holiness. The second trap is that of missing the real issues in our lives.

Holiness, as taught in the Scriptures, is not based upon knowledge on our part. Rather, it is based upon the resurrected Christ in-dwelling us and changing us into His likeness.

We cannot effectively pursue holiness without the Word of God stored up in our minds where it can be used by the Holy Spirit to transform us. Jerry Bridges, The Discipline of Grace, 180

My righteousness is just as good as Jesus' righteousness, because it IS Jesus' righteousness!

In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity.

A far cicada rings high and clear over the river__ heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relict of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth__ mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian landmass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies. The rise of the Himalaya, begun in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing: an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into the rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through northeastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal.

Holiness is the strength of the soul. It comes by faith and through obedience to God's laws and ordinances. God then purifies the heart by faith, and the heart becomes purged from that which is profane and unworthy. When holiness is achieved by conforming to God's will, one knows intuitively that which is wrong and that which is right before the Lord. Holiness speaks when there is silence, encouraging that which is good or reproving that which is wrong.

It is nothing short of a transformed vision of reality that is able to see Christ as more real than the storm, love more real than hatred, meakness more real than pride, long-suffering more real than annoyance, holiness more real than sin. - Discipline

God will never disappoint us. He loves us and has only one purpose for us : holiness, which in His kingdom equals joy.

If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline.

If a person thinks continually about the purity and holiness of God, then that holiness will begin to show itself in that person's life.