Holy, Holy, Holy

January 4:
This is sort of summary of what I was talking about in Church yesterday.

For years I’ve heard it said that after a time husbands and wives begin to look alike. I have always believed that people have a tendency to “become” like the people they spend the most time with. It’s not so much a physical thing as it is a perceptual thing. People who spend a lot of time together have a tendency to adopt the same mannerism, use the same phrases when they speak and even dress alike. So, long time partners end up sharing enough similarities that, to the casual observer, they appear to be the same.

The most obvious application for this observation is that we need to intentionally spend time with people we want to be like and we need to avoid spending too much time with people we don’t want to “resemble.”

The most incredible application of this train of thinking has to do with our relationship to God. God told Moses “…you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” And then in the book of Leviticus He said, "you shall be holy, for I am holy." What this means is that the holy God wants us to be like Him! Anything less is not enough! God wants us to be holy because he is holy.

And if we continue with my original premise: we become like Him when we commit ourselves to spending time with Him. This is why prayer is so important and why spending time with the Bible and gathering together with other believers is also important.

The word “holy” literally means, “set aside.” God is described as holy because He is “set aside” from the world. We become holy when we allow ourselves to be “set aside” for God. We are taking on the nature of God.

The really remarkable thing (from a Christian perspective) is that this God who is totally different from the world we inhabit has called us to be like Him. This God wants to take broken, worldly creatures like us and make us like Holy.

And as this process begins to take hold we should see it in the way we live our lives. We see ourselves feeding the hungry and caring about the homeless. We see ourselves taking an interest in the environment and working for justice in the world because we are becoming holy. We are becoming like Jesus. This is the way it is meant to work. This is the way it is meant to be.

Being a Christian is not working harder to try to achieve some impossible goal. It is not about obeying a set of arbitrary rules. Being a Christian is becoming what God is! Holy. Don’t sell yourself short and don’t settle for anything less.