Is Holiness a Culture thing or a Lifestyle?
1 Peter 1:13-25.
Quite a while ago I began a message where I told you about a young lady who went to a pastor she had never met before to talk with him about a problem concerning her wedding. She & her fiancé had different church backgrounds & they had asked each of their pastors to participate in a joint wedding ceremony. His pastor said “Yes,” but her pastor said “No.” Well, she was quite hurt by that because she had gone to that church all her life. A few days later her pastor called & told her that he had changed his mind & would take part in the wedding after all because she was not a Christian. He told her that if she had been a Christian, he would have had to say “No.” Here was, a young lady in her mid-20’s, who had always attended church regularly, even while away at a church college, & she isn’t a Christian. Her mother is a very devout member of their church, & all the children attend regularly. But this young lady had never become a Christian. And now she didn’t dare become a Christian before her wedding or her preacher wouldn’t take part in the ceremony. She was asked why she had never become a Christian. She told me, “Nobody ever asked me. I guess I was a kind of an unruly girl or something, so maybe they didn’t want me. I attended a church college, too. But nobody ever said a word to me about becoming a Christian & being baptized. So I never did. In my whole life, nobody has ever suggested that I become a Christian. I grew up living next door to a family that went to a holiness church. Their son was one of my friends. We hung out together but in all the years that I knew that family not once was I or any member of our family ever asked if we wanted to go to church.
A number of survey have been are taken place in the last few years where they were surveying people who at one time went to church to find out why they aren’t going today. One of the results is that many who are outside the church are convinced that today’s Christian lifestyle doesn’t line up with what Biblical churches actually teach. The result is that many non church goers think that Christians are a bit hypocritical. The perception of those who are outside the church is that there is very little difference between believers in Christ and the world. I would imagine we have heard someone say, “The church is full of hypocrites” or “I’m just as good as they are even though I don’t go to church every Sunday so why should I bother? A result of a survey of church going Christians, by that they mean people who have accepted Jesus Christ and go to their respective churches every week. They feel that the people of the world are just being picky.
The Christian organizations that are doing the survey feel that if they are to reach today’s world they need to understand people’s reaction to Christianity and the church. At one time when a pastor was preaching to the un-church the pastor would always ask if people wanted to go to heaven. Then he would explain God’s plan that if we look to the scripture we will discovered that the first direction given in the Bible on how to get to heaven is that we must have faith. We must believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died on the cross for our sins, & that He is risen from the dead & is alive forevermore, & He is coming again. He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Now faith is such an important part of the way to heaven that some people say that one lifestyle doesn’t matter even if you believe in Jesus. Their concept is that saying one believes in Jesus is enough to get them into heaven. But the Bible doesn’t give us that kind of an answer and we need to realize that.
James 2:19. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that & shudder.
But they’re not saved they’re lost! The demons won’t be in heaven, even though they believe and even though they tremble before God. So there is more of a answer to the question on how to get to heaven than just believing in Jesus. You see, most everybody believes. If you went out on the streets & started asking people, do you believe in God? Do you believe in Jesus? pollsters say that more than 80% of the people would answer, Yes, I believe. The problem is, the belief that many of these people say they have hasn’t affected the way they live & what they do.
As 3-year-old Beverly was playing with her toys her mother noticed Beverly’s blouse was dirty & needed to be changed. So she told Beverly to take it off & bring it to her so she could wash it. After telling her twice with no response, her mother called her again only with her voice raised. Beverly Elizabeth did you hear me? Beverly answered, Yes, Mama. My ears did, but my legs didn’t. That is the way it is today. We hear the message with our ears but we don’t do anything about it. As I think about the young lady in the opening illustration it made me realize that we assume that everyone in church is saved. I remember a man who started going to a church and for some reason no one ever asked him if he had accepted the Lord Jesus as his savior. What they did do was ask him to serve the church in position which required that whoever took that position was required to be a born again Christian.
There are at least two main groups of people that the Evangelical church needs to know about so they can reach them.
ONE OF THE GROUPS ARE WE I CALL THE DE-CHURCH.
The Bible tells us in 2 Peter 3:9 that The Lord is not willing that any should perish. And Jesus told us in Mark 16:15-16, Go into all the world & preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes & is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. Do you want to go to heaven? I do and I would like to have as many of my family and friends there that I can encourage. Here is the thing there are billions of people whom we might call the de-church who at one time had been active and who regular attended a Bible teaching church someplace, at some point, but now they are disconnected. They are different than the un-church who only went to church to attend a funeral or some special item. The de-church have been in the church or in the faith which is not necessarily the same thing but have chosen to walk away. I am convinced that there are literally hundreds of people who fit this description within a 30 minute radius of us today. I am not talking about the person who chose to go to another church. This is not about the people/person who left over music preferences or the color of the carpet. I am talking about sincere people who have checked out because they felt the standards were too high and that they couldn’t measure up, I am also talking about the people who saw some kind of inconsistency in the church that caused them to question the validity of the message that they heard, or any one of a hundred other reasons.
WHAT PEOPLE SEE IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE WILL INFLUENCE HOW THEY THINK AND RESPOND.
People will choose to accept or reject Christianity and they will attend or avoid churches simply because of their perceptions about the church and Christians who go. People perceptions are often based on certain experiences they have had in the church. If they perceive the church as judgmental, boring, insincere, arrogant, or irrelevant, why would they or anyone else want anything to do with it? I am concerned that too many churches and individual Christians are sending entirely the wrong message. The message of the church has been come to Christ on our terms or goes to hell. What’s interesting is that organizations have work very hard trying to understand international cultures where we send missionaries but we do a very poor job of dissecting and trying to understanding the culture right where we live. There’s a problem when we decide that we are more comfortable with OUR preferences and OUR traditions than we are in finding new and creative ways to reach our world for Christ. It should be very troubling to us today when companies like Nike and American Eagle are more interested and involved in reaching and understanding today’s generation than we are. These companies want to understand this generation because they intend to reach them so they can sell them their product. The evangelical church has something greater to offer to our young people than a pair of footwear.
People won’t change their perceptions just because we disagree with them.
The evangelical churches today need to take an honest look at who they are and then they need to ask themselves the big question. Can the evangelical churches return to the fires that birth the organization? Maybe a better question would be does the organization want to return to the fires of holiness? Our answer will have a huge impact on what we become as a church and as individuals. You are what you are, not what you tell people you are. That’s an important principle that needs to be applied to the church and to each of us individually. One of the things that we are told every day is that our culture is on the move. So if the Christian faith has an image problem, can it be fixed? We can’t fix it if all we try to do is defend ourselves and try to make ourselves look good. The reputation of the Christian faith should never be managed or spin-doctored but we can change how we are known and we do that by becoming more Christ like. Those outside the church have not always perceived Christians to be Christ like. Research has shown again and again that today it is very difficult to see any difference between the lifestyle of professing Christians and the world. Imagine a room full of professing Christians and another room filled with people who make no claim for Christ. Based on lifestyle alone, most research points to the fact that you would be hard pressed to tell these groups apart. 84% of the younger generation said they personally know at least one committed Christian but only 15% thought the lifestyles of those Christ followers was significantly different from the norm. To outsiders today, Christianity is anything but Christian. The bad news is that’s only about half the problem because the church is often perceived as irrelevant and out of touch with contemporary culture. The most common message people have heard from the church is that Christianity is a list of religious rules and regulations. The world thinks of the church as hypocritical because they have seen that the church doesn’t even measure up to its own standards. What the church has become is something that didn’t happen overnight. For some reason Christianity decided many decades ago that they wanted to be like the world instead of showing the world what Jesus Christ is like. Just like Satan deceived Eve in the garden he got the evangelical church take some very small steps away from what the Lord Jesus wanted so the church would look more like the world. Another thing Satan did was that he got the church to teach rules instead of teaching the Bible and this especially drove people away because they felt they couldn’t measure up. There is no question about the fact that Jesus calls us to be different. That difference will be reflected in our lifestyle. It is not wrong to think that there should be a distinct difference in how we think, how we act, and the way we live. John 15:1-8. Makes it clear that the fruit of our lives is the evidence of our faith. We should be constantly aware of the kind of fruit our lives are bearing in our walk with Christ? James points out that we must have some way of measuring the reality of our faith. From James 2:20-26 we learn that to tool to measure our faith is our deeds. James also informs us that if we don’t have deeds based on our faith then our faith is nothing more than a series of empty beliefs. As most of you know I believe deeply in holiness and that means that I believe that God is holy, that He has called us to be holy, and the Holy Spirit will enable us to live the holy life that He has called us to live.
Hebrews 12:14. Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.
If we really believe the Bible then we must accept that verse and in accepting that verse we need to better understand what it means to be holy. And just because we call something holy, that doesn’t mean that it is. There is a huge difference in living in a Christian culture and living a holy life. A simple premise is that true spiritual transformation means becoming more like Jesus Christ. The call to holiness is a call to be authentic, honest, and humble. How can we be more like Jesus? The result of churches preaching rules and traditions is that What some people think of the church isn’t very flattering.
The reason why they think what they do is because of wrong teaching. Christianity as a culture was characterized by the following list which isn’t a complete list.
We had rules and regulations about Movies, Dance, Alcohol, Tobacco, Makeup, Jewellery, Clothes, etc. I remember a pastor who preached a sermon because a couple of ladies came to church with pierced ears.
In the Christian culture, people are constantly trying to measure up so they can make the cut. It was always about looking the part and making sure that you are accepted. There has always been in Christians lives a fear of condemnation based on the fact that if people knew you were struggling in some are of your life they wouldn’t accept you as a Christian. The odd thing about this concept was that we were centring on self and concern for self all the while we were told that the selfish nature was supposed to be gone. Most of us are familiar with Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a Redneck if¼” books and quotes. They have one for preachers. “You might be a preacher if¼you’d rather negotiate with terrorists than with the church organist.
We may not want to admit it but we were actually taught to become legalistically. The Pharisees got into over 600 rules and regulations from the Ten Commandments. Life was lived by the measuring rod. In the Christian culture it is all about the law and you head very little about grace. The tragic issue is that we have alienated a generation defending legalistic issues that have no long-term significance. This may be why the church is known more for what we are against than what we are for.
There has been a great emphasis on the external things and too little emphasis on the heart and what it means to truly live like Jesus. We have often made these things issues of right and wrong rather than admitting they were issues of tradition or personal preference. The Christian culture has at times been very judgmental. People who tend to live their lives by the measuring rod have often compare themselves with others and pass judgment focusing on the speck in their brother’s eye while keeping attention off of the log in their own. We’re not to measure up to one another. It’s not about being as good as someone else in the church. Jesus is to be the standard for every believer. In the Christian culture it is very easy to slip into a prideful mindset, looking down at those whom we don’t think are measuring up. We can become very critical. One of the results of the Christian culture is that because we have intermingled our personal convictions, personal preferences, or manmade traditions with God’s truth and the result is that our tradition became the standard of right and wrong. An example is Music.
The people who grew up or lived in these environments for long usually went to one of two extremes; They lived with incredible Guilt and Shame, never feeling like they could measure up, feeling like they were the only one that couldn’t make the cut. So they suffered in silence and they lived with a deep sense of guilt and shame.
They checked out. They decided that what was required to live in this holiness culture was beyond them and since they could never measure up, or perhaps because they chose not to even try, they threw in the towel. Sadly, when some threw in the towel they did so not only on holiness culture, but on Christ, the church, and Christianity as a whole. That’s the tragedy that we face today and that is precisely why we must do our best to understand our culture better so that we can minister to those whose lives have been affected and so that we can do our best to prevent this from ever happening again.
WHAT CHARACTERIZES A TRUE HOLINESS LIFESTYLE?
What does true holy living look like? I am going to share only a couple of items. Please don’t look at this as a checklist for you to try to measure up to. Instead, it is offered as a starting point and a guideline to get each one of us thinking about the profound implications of what it truly means to live a lifestyle of holiness.
Relationship. Holiness is not about rules but about your relationship that is centred on Christ. Not on self. Where holiness culture is often centred on self, a holy lifestyle will be centred on Christ and concerned for others not with ourselves. If the Christian culture is based on the law, then a holiness lifestyle must be based on “Grace”. You don’t need a long list of rules when your heart is one with Christ. Holiness is a matter of the heart. And from the overflow of the heart there will be some obvious changes in what we think and how we act.
Humility. People who belong to the Christian culture are looking down at people they perceive don’t measure up. Holy living involves awareness that none of us are good on our own apart from Jesus Christ.
In the Holiness culture the sole Emphasis is always on Christ. We are to be like Jesus. Spiritual maturity involves becoming more like Christ. That is God’s goal for every one of us. That we be shaped and moulded into the image of His Son.
1 John 2:6. Anyone who says he is a Christian should live as Christ did.
I have known people who lived in the Christian culture and who were struggling to measure up to a set of rules that actually stopped them from living like Jesus. If we are taught and you live in a holiness lifestyle, people will see Jesus in you. The true evidence of a Spirit Filled life is The Fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control (Galatians 5:22-23).
The Bible doesn’t say, “They shall know we are Christians by the rules that we keep.”
I want to share with you my paraphrase of what the Bible actually says in John 13:35. By this all people will know that you are Jesus disciple if we have love for one another. Our lives will be characterized by the Fruit of the Spirit. Holiness is about being transformed into the very image of Jesus Christ. We cannot be content with cop outs or excuses. Holiness is about being real. It is about growing up in your faith. It is about maturity and spiritual growth. Holiness isn’t about the rules and regulations. In fact as we closer you get to Jesus you wouldn’t want to do anything that would discredit Christ or the Kingdom and most of all you would never want to disobey or displease your Father in Heaven.
Holiness is characterized by love. It flows from the inside out. It is the result of an inward transformation brought about by the Holy Spirit at work within us. And when a genuine transformation takes place on this level, it will change the way we think, the way we act, and the way we live. Holy living is not about adopting a belief system. It is about a lifestyle. When we allow holiness to be defined by experience, we are in danger of experiencing a very pale imitation of what authentic holy living is really all about. The Spirit of God will enable you to live the life God is calling you to live. The closer you get, the more you will desire to be like Him. It will make a difference in the way you live, do business, worship and relate to family to name a few. For holiness to be what it ought to be, it must begin in the heart. There must be an inward transformation, and it will result in outward transformation. It only works if we it allow the Spirit of God to do His work within us. Suddenly you don’t have to legislate right and wrong. God’s law is written on our hearts. And the thing that really motivates us more than anything is love. Our love for God and our love for people is now the driving force behind all that we say and do. I have found that people will go so much further in their walk with Christ when they operate from a heart of love, than they ever would when you are trying to regulate and legislate their lives by forcing them to live up to some set of rules. The Holy Spirit is far more effective at transformation than you or I will ever be.
A very special thanks to Sermon Central for the help and the idea for this message..
