WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HOLY?

Our elders are entering a season of wrestling with a major topic on behalf of the church. Maybe the center of the topic is the practical definition of holiness. God is holy; what does that mean? He tells us to be holy as He is holy; what does that look like?

In the "good ol' days," conservative evangelicals knew what holiness looked like. Good boys and girls didn't do certain things, and the list was pretty much universally understood: don't smoke or drink, don't cuss or steal, no sex outside of marriage, be sure to go to church and tithe, that sort of thing. Furthermore, don't do anything that LOOKS bad, like playing cards, going to movies or going to bars. (Sometimes the Scripture, "Avoid every appearance of evil" was mistranslated for this principle.)

Using these legalistic standards, we could tell you what sin was, and consequently could feel pretty comfortable with our holiness. Holiness was avoiding anything on the Top Ten Sins list. In fact, those who did the best at appearing to keep away from the Top Ten would be elevated to positions of leadership, such as deacon and elder, where they could help watch over the flock to be sure no one else backslid into a sinful lifestyle. It was all pretty tidy.

Of course, Jesus often upset our comfortable system by talking about hating our brother or lusting after women. But those kinds of things were so hard to measure that we mostly ignored them. After all, how could you tell if someone lusted? But you could tell if someone was divorced, so that became the practical standard.

We all know what happened to our idyllic system of measurable holiness. It fell prey to the skeptical scrutiny of postmodernism. We discovered that many of the people who seemed pure on the outside were really full of pride, selfishness, greed and lust, while others who did not fit the old system were really quite balanced and healthy in their spiritual lives. And none of us was pure, after all.

So now we stand at a crossroad. If we can't measure holiness by the old standards, how do we know whether we are being holy?

I think that most postmoderns today focus so much on running away from the old legalistic measurements of holy living that they no longer consider the command to be holy. We so much emphasize grace and mercy that we have almost completely ignored the call to be godly. We no longer use the "s" word (sin) or the "r" word (repent), because those only alienate people and block them from hearing the Good News. Resultantly, the individual conscience has become the ultimate, and maybe the only, measurement of right and wrong. Freedom without holiness is idolatry, and grace without zeal is antichrist, just as faith without works is dead.

Where do we go from here? The elders are hoping to schedule a retreat late this summer to wrestle with this subject together, seeking the Lord and fasting and studying so that we can help to shepherd our flock.

"LORD, we want to please you as a people. We want to want what You want, and we want to hate what You hate. Give us Your eyes and Your heart, and lead us in paths of righteousness for Your name's sake. We ask this of You, Father God, in the name of Your Son through the will shown to us by Your Spirit. Amen."