Our world is starving for in-person holiness. Everybody’s different truths collide. The general belief that there is no absolute truth has dangerously decomposed what God set in motion in the Garden. People pick their own fruit and don’t ask whether it is on God’s menu or not. Or they make their arguments why it has become sanctioned.
God has always had one mission formula in mind to reach His world. It isn’t a protest. It doesn’t take conferences and training sessions. It takes an emptied self so that the life we surrender to God is a fresh canvas for Him to fill with Himself and His holiness. That means we love with HIS love, not our best interpretation of His love. We forgive with the forgiveness He gave us, not based on anyone’s merit. We help with God’s help in His way and in His time. We let God show His holiness through us.
That’s holiness in person. We make it possible for people to see God’s holiness working, forming, growing and changing us. We don’t live it so they can see it. That’s artificial and can easily turn into hypocrisy. We live God’s life because we want to know God. We want His excavation to clear our lives of anything that mars His image. We live listening. We live wholly tuned to His whispers, warnings, and affirmations. We live in Him, by Him, and for Him.
It is a fact that the more you live with a person, the more you become like that person. There is a natural transfer that sometimes we don’t even perceive without specific reflection. I don’t mean automatic. There’s a blurring between who I am and who I become as God lives in me. The more I ask for God to take over my preferences, my priorities, my interpretations, my relationships, my goals, my words, my thoughts, my everything; the more God’s holy character influences my feeble one.
This is God’s plea to us this Lenten season. He wants to live in us to prompt, warn, and grow us so that people see how God transforms a life. We are not called to be good people. People can be good without God. We’re called to be holy people. Holiness is a life. It is our waking, eating, working, playing life. We don’t do things a certain way with a pious face to show holiness. We live by the heartbeat of God. We let His heart rule over anything our weak and self-willed heart might prefer. We wake and work and live and take our identity from Who God is.
Our world needs to see God today. Not in a sunrise or a forest, but in us. Our world needs in person holiness. Nothing brings the awakening our world desperately needs more than a people called by God who let God live His life in them. Everyday. In every way. When people are looking and when they are not.
Take time for sober reflection this week. Ask God if He has all of you. Don’t substitute try-harder-work for the beautiful oneness and essential rhythms He would bring to live His holiness in you. Open more. Surrender more. Celebrate more. Become lost in God’s holy transforming reality for you. Your world needs holiness in a person just like you.
Don't forget to get Week 3 of this year's Lenten guide by clicking below
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