Our Need For Holiness

According to A. W. Tozer, in his book on The Knowledge of the Holy, he tells us of God’s holiness and of the reason for His redeemed ones to be holy as He is holy.

Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death.

Since God’s first concern for His universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under His eternal displeasure. To preserve His creation, God must destroy whatever would destroy it.

God is holy with an absolute holiness that knows no degrees, and this He cannot impart to His creatures. But there is a relative, a contingent holiness which He shares by imputation and by impartation, and because He has made it available [to His redeemed ones] through the blood of the Lamb, He requires it of them.

We must hide our unholiness in the wounds of Christ as Moses hid himself in the cleft of the rock. We must take refuge from God in God. We must believe that God sees us perfect in His Son while He disciplines and chastens and purges us that we may be partakers of His holiness.

After reading all this, now I find myself in a quandary. A long while ago I studied to gain from God’s Word verses that would help me live a more pleasing life to the Lord my God, a holy life as I had believed He wanted from me. But recently I found this quote in Andrew Murray’s book on divine healing.

The Christian life is no longer the vain struggle to live right, but the resting in Christ and finding strength in Him as our life – to fight the fight and gain the victory of faith. (Andrew Murray)

So now I see that our absolute surrender must be followed by total “abiding” in Jesus, and trusting Him to keep us and direct us in how to live a holy life. Since everything we do is “nothing good”, we can actually do nothing to help ourselves. To simply follow verses on our own strength only results in a “vain struggle”. Our faith in our sovereign Lord is all that we need to follow the holiness pathway that God has set down for us. Trusting and living in Jesus is actually the only way to stay on that path.

Christianity must change human nature. If it does not, then it has no more power than a good set of morals (Jesse Duplantis).

So I will include the verses I have gleaned from God’s Word on the Holiness Walk, not that they can help us or lead us on a life of holiness by our own efforts, but because they are good verses to have handy when the devil tries to talk us into falling from that path.

The Spirit-filled walk demands that we live in the Word of God as a fish lives in the sea (A. W. Tozer).