Is Holiness Passé?
Romans 6:15-23; Hebrews 12:14
Cascades Fellowship CRC, JX MI
February 13, 2005 (1st Sunday of Lent)
Part 1 of Rediscovering Holiness
In the February 5 edition of the Citizen Patriot the headline read “JPS faces $3 million shortfall.” In recent weeks we have read of a shortfall in the JCC budget as well. Even the state is struggling – Gov. Granholm is considering a 2 billion dollar bond or loan to help pay for existing programs and develop new ones. Everywhere we look, our community needs money. Somehow, some way we have to pump more liquid funds into our coffers.
Now, I can’t say that I have all the answers – especially on the state level. But as I thought about this over the past week, I think I have found a solution for our budget problems in Jackson County. I have found a simple, yet workable plan that with a little extra effort can help shrink the shortfall.
Everyone drive faster. If we all use a little extra energy to push our accelerators a little further down, I think the accumulative affect will be a huge swell of cash into our local economy. Follow me here.
If we are driving faster, we are using more gas, which menas we must buy more gas. This, in turn, leads to greater revenues that are taxable – tax being the primary means to fund local governments. But that is not all.
Faster speeds also mean more fender benders, which means an increase in auto-body work, auto sales, tires sales, auto repairs, increases in insurance, health care services, etc. These increases lead to increases in other industries – it would simply take too long to list them all, so I will let your imagination run wild. All these increases lead to a greater tax base, and so on and so forth. But this is not all.
One of the real beauties of this plan is that it has built in a mechanism to flood money immediately into the system. With the increase in speed would also come an increase in speeding and moving violation tickets. The immediate influx of revenue this would generate might all by itself offset the shortfall. After all, where violation of the law abounds, cash abounds all the more to pay the fines we incur.
Now, please note that as I present this plan to you, I do so tongue firmly planted in my cheek. This plan is just plain silly. Despite rather lame attempt at rationale for the plan, the flaws in the plan are obvious. Only an oaf would seriously suggest such remedy.
Yet, this is just the sort of argument that the apostle Paul faced in his missionary journeys. No, Paul didn’t have to worry about cars or speeding tickets as a revenue source for a city. But he heard this argument in relation to grace. That’s why Romans 6:15-23 makes it into the letter he wrote to the church in Rome.
Really, this part of Paul’s letter begins in Romans 6:1 with these words, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” Paul wrote this letter to the church in Rome with the anticipation that he would be visiting them soon. Up until this point in Paul’s ministry, he and the church in Rome only knew each other by reputation. So he is writing to introduce himself and the gospel he has been commissioned to preach.
As he lays out his theology, he begins with the universal problem of mankind – sin. None of us escape it, we all fall prey to its infection. We come from the womb perverse and bent little creatures inclined to rage against mention of dependency upon a Creator. We want to be self-made, self-assured and self-reliant. We’d rather worship animals, the stars, the sun, especially ourselves rather than God. We purposely stifle the truth, suffocating it in layers of self-deceit and wishful thinking that there is no God. So much so, that we miss the countless expressions of God’s presence and glory in the world around us. In other words, we can claim ignorance, but that is no excuse. We were blind toward God because we closed our eyes. We were deaf toward him because we stopped up our ears.
After Paul makes it clear that we all have this huge problem, he tells us what God has done about it. When we were helpless to do anything for ourselves – when we were so indifferent, we weren’t even losing sleep over being at odds with God – God sent his Son. When the time was ripe, Jesus Christ came in human flesh and lived among us the kind of life God intended man to live. And, then, beyond all hope, Jesus traded his sinless life for our sinful life on the cross. Just as death entered into the world through the disobedience of one man, so through Christ’s obedience the many are brought to life.
The question then becomes, since through a tremendous act of grace we are given eternal life through Christ, how do we live now? Since we don’t deserve what Jesus has done for us and since we can’t earn it, does it really matter how we live? If God’s glory is revealed through the grace he has shown in Jesus Christ, doesn’t greater sin lead to greater grace and so the greater glory?
That’s the question Paul begins to address in chapter 6 – how do we live? As Christians, we often have difficulty answering this question, don’t we? There seems to be so many degrees and variations of faithfulness that we sometimes find ourselves with that deer-in-the-headlights look when we think about what our faith means for everyday life. We normally end up reducing how our life expresses our faith down to a list of do’s and don’ts. We’re Christians so we go to church on Sundays, we only go to movies rated PG or lower, and we spend at least an hour in prayer every morning. We don’t lie, cheat or steal, we don’t cuss, and we don’t dance.
The problem with this approach is that it subjects us to a form of law. We buy into the lie that we are righteous people because of what we do, not who we are. So we try to do all the right things to be righteous. And in doing so, we become a slave to the law and out of tune with grace.
So if not with law, even a self-imposed, voluntary law, then how do we live in the light of this tremendous grace that God has shown us in Christ? In Romans 6:19, Paul answers, “Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness.”
At first blush here, Paul seems to be at odds with the idea that we no longer live under the law, but grace. After all, when one is a slave, one does what one is told and nothing else. But there are two images at work in this passage that need to be understood.
The first, because it is the most obvious, is slavery. We don’t like to talk about slavery in the United States because it nearly destroyed our union and degraded our fellow man. The wounds of slavery upon the soul of America are still tender. It is an image we would prefer to avoid altogether. But in Paul’s day it was common – so common that it could be used to illustrate a good cause. And as we understand it today, so it was understood by society at the time. For whatever reason one is enslaved, once there his life is controlled by the one who owns him.
But the second image is what makes this passage. It is a faith image, an image of the temple. It is an image drawn from one’s religious life. Offering. To surrender something to another for his or her use and discretion. To relinquish control in order to express devotion, gratitude.
Now, let’s jam these two things together to see what Paul is saying. Paul’s answer to the “do’s and don’ts” approach is to offer our bodies, our lives, our energies and talents as an act of devotion and gratitude to the control of righteousness. In the same way that we voluntarily and willing submitted our bodies to all the appetites and stimulations of sin and sinful behavior, we are now to voluntarily and willfully submit our bodies to righteous desires and actions.
Okay, so what are righteous desires and actions. First, let me warn you, be careful here because it is real easy to formulate a
”do’s and don’ts” list at this point. Probably, a better approach is to define “righteousness.”
“Righteousness” in the sense that Paul uses it here is not a reference to moral purity or achievement, although it does have implications for a person’s morality. In Paul’s thinking, righteousness speaks more to God’s saving action in Jesus Christ than to our keeping the Ten Commandments. Remember, Paul argues in Romans 3 and 4 that righteousness cannot come by the Law because we cannot keep all of it perfectly. When any part of the Law is broken, the whole covenant it is meant to secure is also shattered. So righteousness cannot come through the Law.
But God, who is faithful to his covenant, redeems us through Christ. God satisfies his own divine justice through Christ, and so secures the covenant against violation. We being weak and unable to keep the law perfectly are now enabled to keep covenant with God and draw near to him, even with our imperfections. All because of what Christ did for us. Because of him, we are declared righteous or more simply put, we are put in a right relationship with God, the one we were intended to have, the one we were born for. Our relationship to God is fully restored through Christ. By virtue of that relationship we are declared righteous.
So righteousness or offering ourselves as slaves to righteousness, as Paul says, is to live faithfully in that right relationship with God the way he intended us to live. Not because it is the Law, but because now it is our nature to do so. We are new creatures in Christ, the old has passed and the new is come. We want to live a life that is consistent with who we already are in Jesus Christ. And when we live a life that is consistent with who we are – abandoning the old habits and vices in favor of a life marked by gratitude and praise – the result of that life is holiness.
Throughout my life, there is one criticism that has dogged my steps like bad b.o. For some reason, even before I was a Christian, people accused me of being “holier than thou.” The first time someone said that to me, I’m not even sure I understood what they were saying. But since that time I have learned and I think I have figured out why people keep saying this about me. It is because I am always right…. (oops! My bad – I read that wrong) because I always think I am right. But being told I am “holier” than someone else doesn’t bother me much anymore. Not because I realize it is untrue, but because it tells me the person calling me “holier” has no idea what s/he is talking about – they don’t understand what it means to be holy.
Holiness has gotten a bad rap for some time now. We almost hate to be thought of as holy, don’t we? IN our opinion, holy people – or at least those who think they are holy – are perfectionists out to judge the world against their impossible standard. We have this weird catch 22 thing going with holiness. Those who think they are holy really are just knuckleheads overwhelmed with their own self-importance. The form of their religion is great, but the heart of their religion is pride. The really holy people don’t know they are holy – it’s as if holiness sneaks up on them and drapes around them like some mysterious shroud. Today, holiness has this bizarre undertone of arrogance; of someone who thinks they are better than we are.
So no one wants to be thought of as holy. And we certainly don’t want to appear “too holy.” That would mean that we are out of touch with reality – that we have somehow slipped into this frame of mind where we just don’t get the real world anymore. We become too spiritual.
Now, let’s think about what is being said here. Too holy. Too spiritual. Do you see what we are setting ourselves up for, the lie we are about to buy into? How can we be too holy or too spiritual? What are we afraid of here? We are afraid of the world seeing us for who we really are – a holy people, a nation of priests. We are afraid of being called and separated from the rest of the world, of being singled out because of our faith. Better to be wall flower Christians than to endure the withering glare of those who are threatened by our testimony. That’s right, I said threatened. The testimony of a holy life threatens the unbelieving and the one who marginally believes because it forces them to face the truth – God is real and has a real claim on their lives.
So what are we talking about when we talk about holiness? What does it mean to be holy? This is what we are going to be talking about over the next few weeks during the season of Lent. In our text from Hebrews we are told that “… without holiness, no one will see the Lord,” so one thing is certain, holiness is not passé. It is a timeless pursuit, contemporary in every age and the vocation of every Christian. You are to be holy as God is holy.
So let’s close this morning with just a quick definition of holiness. J.I. Packer, in his book Rediscovering Holiness defines holiness as being “separated and set apart for God, consecrated and made over for him. In its application to people, God’s ‘holy ones’ or saints, the word implies both devotion and assimilation: devotion in the sense of living a life of service to God; assimilation, in the sense of imitating, conforming to, and becoming like God one serves.”
In other words, holiness is bringing our lives into agreement or conformity with what we already are as the children of God. You may not know it, but your life in Christ has a very specific goal – to be conformed to image of Christ. All your experiences, good and bad, are used by God to shape you, to mold you into the image of his Son, so that your character and heart look like his character and heart.
People of God, holiness is not some otherworldly, spiritual weirdness; it is the goal of our salvation. It is what we are in Christ, and who we are striving to become in Christ.
