Shrinking God's Holiness

How we have made God a shrinking reality

DON’T BE AFRAID!

Have you ever wondered which hurts the most? Saying something and wishing you hadn’t? or Saying nothing and wishing you had? I guess the most important things are the hardest things to say. Don’t be afraid to tell someone you love them. If you do, they might break your heart...if you don’t, you might break theirs. Have you ever decided not to become a couple because you were so afraid of losing what you already had with that person? Your heart decides whom it likes and whom it doesn’t. You can’t tell your heart what to do. It does it on its own....when you least suspect it, or even when you don’t want it to. Have you ever wanted to love someone with everything you had, but that other person was too afraid to let you? Too many of us stay walled up because we are too afraid to care too much...for fear that the other person does not care as much, or even at all. Have you ever denied your feelings for someone because your fear of rejection was too hard to handle? We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger. Life is all about risks and it requires you to jump. Don’t be a person who has to look back and wonder what they would have done, or could have had.

Col. 3:1-10, 12-17

One of the greatest victories that has been won by God’s enemy is the power to persuade most people to think, Christians included, that there is no war being waged so we just need to relax, take it easy, feel good and have a party.

What has been done because the holiness of God has been reduced in size? A clear vision of God’s holiness will have a profound effect on people just as a faint, watered down vision will affect people adversely. If you will let me we can see how thoughts of who God is has slipped even into the thoughts of some Christians which takes a toll on the holiness of God. Have you heard of God being referred to as “the man upstairs", "Big Daddy" or "the good lord?” I do not believe that those who experienced God in the Old Testament ever would have used such words. Many trembled even at hearing His name Yahweh. In our day and age we do not tremble for our God is love and surely would not hurt people.

Let us look at six effects of reducing the fact that God is not a holy God:

1. Shrinking God’s holiness means there is no law for us to follow or obey. Simply put, with out the holiness of God there are no absolutes. If you have heard the news in the recent year because we lack absolutes the Catholic Church priests were caught with child molestations, the Episcopal Church has let homosexuals become ministers and we have churches that run on good feelings with little doctrinal structure. Without the law and believing we have to answer the One who made the law we have no fear as how we should live. Absolutes have to have a standard. There has to be Someone, somewhere who lives to display and enforce that standard. We can only improve when we have a standard to reach for. When God is not holy we bring Him down to being just like us and who are you looking at as a human whom you would set as a standard to live up too? I believe that most of us would believe we are all in process and have not arrived at perfection yet. If there is no standard then what do we have to live for. Barry Bonds hit his 600 H. R. and tied with his standard Willie Mays. What will be his next standard for his life is not over yet. There is a man name Nietzche said, “Where there is an absence of God all that is left is power.” There can be no law unless there is Someone fit to make and enforce such. Just one more thing on this point: God set down that he was holy a long time before He gave His law in Exodus.

Col 3:2 "Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. 5Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6Because of these, the wrath of God is coming."