5. Helps to Holiness
Five
Helps to Holiness
Is it more difficult to live a holy life in the twenty-first century than it was in the first century AD or in the 1890s? Many Christians would have us think so. The assumption seems to be that our century is rife with new pitfalls. In spite of the fact that holiness entails a certain amount of attention to particulars, which can vary enormously from one era or culture to another, it boils down to two foundational underpinnings that hold true for every century: Trust and Obey. Holiness means loving God and doing what He says. The first-century heart is the same as the twenty-first-century heart—desperately in need of saving, stubbornly selfish, and fairly disinclined to trust and obey God.
It’s easy to see why we believe our path to holiness is more difficult than that of earlier or simpler Christians. Here we are, weltering in a plethora of choices, overloaded with information, stymied by our energy-saving devices, with too many places to go, too many things to do, too many choices all the time.
Recently, I was standing in a long line waiting to pay for an item of clothing. I turned to the man behind me and said, “You know the problem with America is that there are too many choices.”
He said, “You’re right. Too many choices. My wife works in a grocery store and there is a whole aisle of different breakfast cereals—nothing else in that aisle. That’s where you see these frantic mothers with a two-year-old grabbing their skirts and an infant in the cart and a four-year-old racing toward the candy counter while the mother is saying to him (probably somewhat plaintively), ‘Honey, what would you like for breakfast?’”
Our queue went back into a display of black dresses—black dresses as far as we could see. Now in the back of my mind I had been thinking that it would be rather nice to own a black dress. That is, until I saw the dizzying array of styles of black dresses!
Too many choices, too little time—but the same human heart reaching up to the same God who says, “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Pet. 1:16, NIV). Peter is addressing Christians, those who bear the name of Christ, and he is backing up his imperative (do it!) by quoting the Book of Leviticus. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. He sees everything in your world and He wants you to listen to Him, trust Him, obey what He tells you to do.
Deliver Us from Temptation
Is there a way of life, a manner of serving the Lord, that will deliver us from the temptations and distractions around us? Life in a convent or monastery looks to many of us on the outside as though it would almost guarantee a degree of holiness that is far beyond the rest of us. But a letter from a friend who is a nun showed me that there is no such guarantee. For her, as for me, to walk with God is to walk by faith, to trust and obey one day at a time, recognizing our never-ending need for grace:
Elisabeth, every part of our “Rule” has been chosen to free us for prayer. Centuries of experience have contributed to providing us with an atmosphere most conducive to freeing the mind and heart for prayer. Yet I’m afraid with all that has been given, one can settle for the shell, going through the motions only. We can compromise the spirit of freedom we have received from the Lord Jesus with the ersatz security and satisfaction of bondage to the letter of our Rule. We can still very easily get caught up in the busy-ness that makes our heart more a marketplace than a house of prayer.
I joined the Sisters upon my graduation from college. I’m afraid my decision was far from noble and generous. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was pretty much pride that led me here, the desire to excel, to do the most, the best. My temperament tended to approach things “from the chin up,” and this decision, as I came to see later, was much more one of my mind than of my heart. That’s where I was “at,” and from that place the Lord drew me, in spite of my faults and imperfections. He was pursuing me long before I knew I needed to be pursued. I felt I was all His, not knowing that this was something I would have to learn, and keep on learning for a long time to come! It took a lot of shaking to wake me up.
Several years later, after I had made my perpetual profession of vows, the crisis came. A series of circumstances knocked the bottom out of my life. After months of anguish, confusion, hurt, and loneliness, I had nowhere to turn but to the Lord. I suddenly realized that I had indeed been “squandering my heritage in a far country” by being so preoccupied with myself, my reputation, etc. With freedom and joy, I realized that my Father did not mind being a last resort, and that He was waiting for me with open arms and a wide-open heart.
It was only then that my heart was awakened, and I began to learn the meaning of prayer. This was the first time I asked the Lord what He wanted of me, and only then did I make my real commitment to Him, choosing to remain forever in the service of my Master, and begging Him to open my ears, that his Word might truly be my life.
As my friend learned, God wants us. He meets us. He takes us forward. He wants us to be holy. The apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth: “So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Cor. 10:12–13, NIV). He chose us before we chose Him. He wants to bring us safely home, through every temptation.
His Power to Transform
Jesus doesn’t start from nothing as He conforms us to His own likeness. It is a divine principle that His saving and transforming power act upon the stuff we are made of, our personalities, our tastes, our prejudices, our experiences. If we present ourselves to Him to be made over into His likeness, the holy version will bear a relationship to what we were before we came to Him.
After all, He created everything in the first place. It’s all His and He can transform it easily. He’s the one who changed water into wine. He’s the one who multiplied two fish and five loaves into enough food for more than five thousand people. He used dirt and His own spit, the materials He had at hand, to make a poultice for the blind man’s eyes. Each of the transformed creations were fabricated from something He had created in the first place.
By the same principle, we know that He does not disregard the kind of person we are when He calls us. Are you by nature impatient? He can transform your impatience into a holy boldness. (Think of Peter.) Are you timid? He can transform your fearfulness into a complete reliance on His strength. (Think of Timothy.) Are you an ordinary, unnoticed housewife? He can make you a Christ-bearer. (Think of Mary.)
The Lord is ready to make strong servants out of the worst of us. But we must believe it; we must come to Him in faith for forgiveness and deliverance and then go out to do the work He has given us to do.
Trust and Obey
There is in each one of us a kind of homelessness, a deep, unspoken, inexpressible longing for a safe place away from the clamor. Without God, most of the world tries to satisfy that longing with more money, more leisure, more things. Christians know that is futile, and yet we too hold back from choosing to cling to Him with single-hearted determination.
It is pride, the root of all sins, that often holds us back. We imagine we can handle things quite well on our own, or we fear that God is likely to tell us to do something we don’t want to do. The whole Christian life is a process of bringing the self-life down to death in order that the life of Jesus may be manifest in us. “He must become greater, I must become less,” said John the Baptist (John 3:30, NIV). Holiness presupposes constant growth through an ongoing relationship with the One who has called us to be holy.
Our pride sometimes causes us to make unnecessary crosses for ourselves:
Let us remember that it is not God who makes many of the crosses that we find in our way, such as we commonly call “crosses.” Our Heavenly Father makes “straight paths for our feet” . . . But when the path that God points out goes north and south, and our stubborn wills lead us east and west, the consequence is “a cross”—a cross of our own making, not that which our Master bids us “take up and carry after Him,” and of which it has been well said, “He always carries the heaviest end Himself.”*
Even in this complicated century, the path to holiness remains the same as it was in the first century after Jesus was born:
Prayer and Meditation
Regardless of how many times in a week we may attend church or read our Bibles, personal prayer is absolutely vital to our growth in trust and holiness. We need it every day, ideally in the early morning when we are least likely to be interrupted. Prayer enables our hearts to be established in a place of peace that can carry us through anything the day may bring. Jesus Himself, who was busier and more in demand than any of us, got up “a great while before day” to commune with His Father (Mark 1:35, KJV). He knew that without prayer, He could not carry on for the next fifteen hours.
When I start to pray, I just put myself in God’s presence. Psalm 46 urges us to “be still and know that I am God.” I don’t talk much. In essence, I say to Him, “Lord, here I am. I want to hear You. I’m ready to be shown.” It is as difficult for me to generate “spiritual” feelings as it is for anybody else. I don’t wait for them. (Often, however, I prime the pump a bit by singing a hymn or reading from my Bible.) Like almost everyone else, I tend to feel scattered and restless. I think of things I need to remember to do during the day. An easy solution to that problem is to have a pencil and paper with which to write down the things I remember. Then I don’t have to keep reminding myself about them and they’ll wait for my attention later.
Most of us start our times of prayer with a rendition of our worries and requests. We can resist that tendency and quiet our overactive minds before Him. He knows everything. There is enough time. I keep a prayer list, the people I want to remember to pray for and the concerns about which I am not yet at peace. I try to pray for whatever is on the list unhurriedly instead of fretfully.
Sometimes we need the help of written prayers. I grew up in a family and a church where we were very suspicious of anybody reading a prayer. We thought that if it was not spontaneous, God was not going to listen to it. Some time later, I realized that the Bible itself is full of written prayers, including the one Jesus taught His disciples when they asked for a model of prayer. “Our Father who art in heaven . . .” (Matt. 6:9–13). The older I get, the more I use that prayer and the more I realize that virtually everything that really matters is contained in that one prayer. I am not praying to get an answer to every question or a solution to every problem, but rather to put my whole life and all the lives of those whom I love in the light of heaven.
If quiet prayer is the foundation of my long day, the first place I go after I wake up, the first conversation in which I engage, it is going to make a difference in everything I do later. Beginning the day with prayer instills a joyful calmness in me that I can bring to the people I encounter throughout the day.
Simple Obedience
After I have consulted Him directly and through His Word and He has reminded me of what I must do, I obey. There are only two choices. The rule of heaven is “Thy will be done.” The rule of hell is “My will be done.” If I’m praying, “Thy will be done,” then presumably I’m prepared to cooperate with it.
Sometimes we get grandiose ideas for schemes we’d love to accomplish for God. Once in a great while, they are truly God’s will. Most of the time, however, His will for us is to do the humble and down-to-earth thing, something for which nobody will ever thank us.
Holy people are always down-to-earth folks. As we learn to trust and obey, we can ask Him to send us people to imitate. God will answer such prayers. When I went to Bible College in Alberta, Canada, far away from my childhood home in New Jersey, God provided an example of holiness for me in the form of a radiant older woman I called Mom Cunningham. She had pink cheeks, twinkly eyes, a perpetual smile, and a lovely Scottish accent. Over tea and scones, I would pour out my heart and she would listen. I don’t remember much of what she said, except that she almost always quoted to me Romans 15:13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.” She must have noticed that the lonely girl across the table seemed to need more joy and peace in believing. She modeled it for me as she loved me and brought my needs to the Father in prayer.
Mom Cunningham protected me from copying a pretentious holiness as she told me about her failures. She was honest about her relationship with God. After her husband died, she told me about her many regrets, the things she should have done and the things she shouldn’t have done. She prayed, “Lord, why didn’t You help me? Why didn’t You show me?” She said He responded with deep love, “Because you weren’t ready to be shown.”
As you and I pursue the way of holiness, may each one of us be “ready to be shown.”
*Annie Webb-Peploe, quoted by Mary Tileston in Joy and Strength (Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1986), 354.