Just a thought, is it not true to say that you are only as holy as you are. :-? Sounds daft, I know, but hang with me a bit.

I believe that in 99% of cases if I try and walk in holiness, is not that a disqualification in itself. I am only holy because of the God who lives in me, not because what I do or don't do. We are talking here about a lifestyle and more pointedly a life, his life, in me motivating, compelling, urging me to fulfill his royal law.

My outward man, visibly, is just the vehicle which transports me from place to place, very much like a motor car. The comment on a race track is never, gee look how fancy that car is, look how fast that car drives, no its gee the driver of that car is really skillful, the attention is on the driver he/she is seen as the most important, not the car. Thats why they have championships for drivers, to celebrate how great they are.

We are just vessels for the Lord, and 'I think' that the majority of Christians try and be Holy which is impossible. God alone is Holy, its one of His attributes. And again I'll say it, its the Holy Spirit in me that makes me Holy. Hence my opening reamark you are only as holy as you are.

I am not disagreeing with you, I'm just looking at it from another angle.

Blessings,

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Zeke Oosthuis

"If someone lives holy to please God, it would be legalism because nothing can please our Holy God except for the cross of Jesus Christ.

However if someone lives holy to praise God, I would say that is the normal Christian life, far from being legalism."

I'm down with that, brother.

If I exalt Sanctification, I preach people into despair; but if I lift up Jesus Christ, people learn the way to be made holy. “For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).

It is a great snare to think that when you are sanctified you cannot make mistakes; you can make mistakes so irreparably terrible that the only safeguard is to “walk in the light, as He is in the light.”

When you come under the searchlight of God after sanctification, you realise much more keenly what sin is than ever you could have done before.

The deliverances of God are not what the saint delights in, but in the fact that God delivered him; not in the fact that he is sanctified, but that God sanctified him; the whole attention of the mind is on God

We are saved and sanctified not for service, but to be absolutely Jesus Christ’s, the consuming passion of the life is for Him.

Never try to build sanctification on an unconfessed sin, on a duty left undone; confess the wrong, do what you ought to have done, then God will clear away all the hyper-conscientious rubbish.

In sanctification it has to be a valediction once and for ever to confidence in everyone and everything but God.

You can always test the worth of your sanctification. If there is the slightest trace of self-conscious superiority about it, it has never touched the fringe of the garment of Christ.

“I lay down My life,” said Jesus; “I lay it down of Myself.”If you are sanctified, you will do the same. It has nothing to do with “Deeper Death to Self,” it has to do with the glorious fact that I have a self, a personality, that I can sacrifice with glad alacrity to Jesus every day I live.
Chambers, Oswald, Disciples Indeed, c1955.

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Ron Bailey