And the desire to know You more fully. We pray that You, by the wooing Holy Spirit, will open every heart and open our minds to see Thee more clearly. More about Jesus would I know.
This is our purpose: the holiness of God in the Bible. I want to take up most of it this morning, and I hope that you will bear with me.
Which book of the Bible do you think has the most references to the word holy? Now, this is the noun, the verb, or the adjective. I’ll give you a hint: it is either Genesis, Exodus, or Leviticus.
And if you are mumbling Leviticus, you are right. There are more than one hundred references in the Book of Leviticus, and there are fifty-nine references in the Book of Exodus. And how many in Genesis? Well, there is one. We will look at that a little bit later.
Actually, Leviticus has the most references, and the book with the second-largest number of references, I wonder if you can guess, is Isaiah. Isaiah saw a holy God. And I wonder if you can guess that the third is a New Testament book. If you thought the Book of Acts, you are right again. No, I knew all of you knew those things. I just thought I would share them with you.
The Book of Leviticus shares about the holiness of the priesthood and of the sacrifices. The Book of Isaiah shares about the holiness of God. The Book of Acts shares about the holiness of God’s new creation, the church.
What a wonderful vision we have of holiness in the Bible. Yet, with all of these references in the Bible—995, not including the references to the saints—what does this word holy mean?
Well, there are a lot of books written about this thing, but this word holy defies definition. It is probably a word that is more clearly sensed than defined: the sense of the holy.
There is a famous theologian who wrote a book, and in this book he said that when we see holiness, we experience mysterium tremendum—mystery and awe. Whenever we touch something that is holy, we suddenly sense a mystery, something that is beyond our understanding.
This theologian goes on to say, and I think he has a pretty good case, that all mankind, to one degree or another, has this sense of mystery when they touch the holy. It is this sense of mystery behind all religions. The only difference is that, to the Jew and now to the Christian, we have a self-revelation of a holy God to give us understanding as to this mystery that we experience.
When we encounter this mystery, we feel like we are in a different place, that the atmosphere has changed. When we encounter the holy, we feel we have entered a different time zone—maybe a twilight zone—suddenly unfamiliar with the surroundings in the midst of a world with which we have been familiar all this time.
So we read those passages I read last night. Moses was walking in the wilderness by Mount Sinai. He had walked there many times before, but when he saw the burning bush and drew near, he found out he was on mysterious ground. There was a holy God calling him to take off his shoes and recognize where he was standing.
I would like for us to look at three passages in the Book of Isaiah—three among many, as I said—that show something of the holiness of God, beginning with the famous passage of Isaiah’s calling in Isaiah 6.
In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on the throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple.
Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
And one called out to another and said,
“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts,
The whole earth is full of His glory.”
And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke.
Then I said, “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”
Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs.
And he touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven.”
I wonder if you sense the mystery behind it: Isaiah’s keen sense that he was in the presence of something that overwhelmed him, in the presence of a holy God.
Let us turn to Isaiah 40, a famous chapter regarding the greatness of God, and verse 21.
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Has it not been declared to you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is He who sits above the vault of the earth,
And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers,
Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain
And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.
He it is who reduces rulers to nothing,
Who makes the judges of the earth meaningless.
Scarcely have they been planted,
Scarcely have they been sown,
Scarcely has their stock taken root in the earth,
But He merely blows on them and they wither,
And the storm carries them away like stubble.
“To whom then will you liken Me
That I should be His equal?” says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these stars,
The One who leads forth their host by number;
He calls them all by name.
Because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power,
Not one of them is missing.
Who do you compare the Holy One to? There is none who is His equal.
And then one verse in Isaiah 57, verse 15:
For thus says the high and exalted One
Who lives forever, whose name is Holy,
“I dwell on a high and holy place,
And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit
In order to revive the spirit of the lowly
And to revive the heart of the contrite.”
When we see Isaiah encountering the Holy One, we can empathize with him. On the one hand, he feels a tremendous curiosity, a tremendous attraction, to view this holy God who sits enthroned, as he envisions Him. Yet, at the same time, he feels a repulsion. He feels a sense of dread because he sees how unholy he is in comparison to the majesty of the Lord God.
We also, even as Christians, have this twofold, ambiguous feeling about a holy God. At one time, we are so attracted to His holiness. We praise Him for His holiness. Yet, on the other hand, we feel a strange reticence to get too near, lest we be burned to a crisp or eaten alive by this bright, white holiness of God.
How can we define this word holy? The word is a mystery, because holiness, and the word holy, by its very definition, has to be defined in terms of God Himself. It is God who is holy. So it is hard for man to really define what this matter of holiness is.
It is a mystery whose definition is finally only revealed as we come to know the Holy One. If you have ever noticed conventional definitions of man regarding holiness, they are usually definitions having to do with moral perfection. We say somebody is holy if they are morally perfect or morally straight.
But this is not the extent or the depth of the true definition of holiness. It has to be seen in terms of God Himself. The trouble with defining holy, anyway, is that by definition, what holy means is all that cannot be defined.
We have some analogy in our human experience to a God of love. We can understand what love is. We have some human analogy to God’s righteousness with man’s righteousness. But when we come to this term holy, it means that God is totally different from any created being.
In the end, we cannot define Him with any analogy, with any human anthropomorphism. No sort of term will finally describe who God is or what He does, because He does things in a completely different way.
Isaiah saw in his vision that God’s ways are much higher than our ways. His thoughts are so much higher that His thoughts are called holy thoughts. It is not like He has thoughts that are just a lot better than ours, or our thoughts multiplied by infinity. No, it is a totally different quality of thinking. It cannot be defined. It is beyond our understanding how God thinks and how God acts.
Yet, when the saints in the Old Testament—and, of course, in the New Testament—encountered God, their remark was, “What a holy God!”
You remember the song that we sing:
Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness,
Fearful in praises, doing wonders?
There is that sense of fear. “Who is like unto Thee?” Do you know where that comes from? This song comes from Exodus 15. It is the song that Moses sings after the children of Israel have gone through the Red Sea and been delivered by the mighty hand of God.
What is it that Moses sings? The paraphrase is: “God, when I saw the way You did this deliverance for us, who is like unto Thee? When You do things, God, You do not just do them a little sneakier than a man, or a little smarter than a man, or a little more powerful than a man. You do things so completely differently that You leave no loose ends dangling.”
“You do everything with total perfection. You cross every ‘t’ and take care of everything. Why, we had need for gold and everything, and wouldn’t you know the Egyptians gave us gold? You thought of everything, God.”
“And the way You did it—you waited for the very last moment, when the chariots were coming down, and then You opened the sea. You could have opened the sea yesterday, but You did not. You waited just the right time. Then You opened it, and we all knew it was Your hand.”
Only God does things exactly this way. When Moses went down to deliver the children, You did not deliver us immediately. You made it harder and harder and harder so that everybody, including Egypt, could fear and tremble at the power of a holy God.
Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness? When God does something, He does it with a capital “D.” It is totally different, and it cannot be compared with man.
There is another song that we sing:
There is none holy as the Lord;
For there is none besides Thee,
Neither is there any God like our God.
Do you know where that comes from? It comes from 1 Samuel 2. This was Hannah’s song after she gave birth to Samuel. Again, the paraphrase is something like this: “There is none like God, who, when He gives birth, gives a miracle birth. He does it at the perfect time.”
“He did it in such a way that it opened my understanding to what God wanted, opened my understanding to God’s design, and opened my understanding to my desire. I saw who I was and who He was. There is none like that.”
When He brings forth a child, it is a miracle event. There is none holy; there is no God like Him. There is no comparison. You cannot take the god Baal and even compare him to the Lord. He is totally in a category by Himself. There is none holy like the Lord.
Another song that we sing is:
Sing unto the Lord a new song, for He has done wondrous things;
His right hand and His holy arm have gotten Him the victory.
His holy arm. Here again we see that when God’s arm moves, there is something so qualitatively different about the way God does things that all we can say is, “It is holy.” There is just no comparison.
In our Christian lives, we sense the way God does things—usually only in retrospect, when we see what He has done. We sense, “My, the way God does things! Isn’t it magnificent?” Unlike anybody else, He is holy.
It causes us to be more curious as to who He is. It causes us to dread, because when God does things, He does things right. He does things pure. We stand off just a little bit because, by comparison, who are we?
Now, the strange thing about this holy God, this loving God, is that He desired to reveal Himself to a people, these children of Israel. He desired to reveal Himself and, more so, to make them a holy people.
What I would like to show you this morning, in a very simple way, is the process by which He brought the children of Israel to a little understanding of what it means for Him to be a holy God and then for them to be a holy people. Let us turn to Exodus 19.
In Exodus 19, the children of Israel have been delivered from Egypt through the Red Sea, and they are now in the wilderness at Mount Sinai. Now they are God’s children. They are, in fact, God’s precious possession. God wants them to be a holy nation.
“You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself.
Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine;
And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel.
So the Lord spoke to Moses, and Moses spoke to the people: “You shall be a holy nation.” I am sure the people, right after their deliverance, said, “Amen to that.”
But these people had been slaves for hundreds of years. I will be honest with you: they not only did not know what it meant to be a holy nation; they did not even know who God really was. So they did not know who they were, and they did not even know what ground they were standing on.
They were so glad to be delivered by God’s mighty hand, but most of them could not have told you whether they were in Egypt, the wilderness, or the promised land. They did not even know what ground they were on. Really, they did not care. They were free—that was the main thing.
They would have been content to be in the wilderness as long as they could be free. They did not know that there was this ground called the promised land waiting for them. They had heard about it, but they were just glad to be free.
They did not know that they were to be a holy nation. They were just glad they were free to be a family, to be whatever God wanted. “Oh, yes, sure, we will do whatever God wants. A holy nation—that is right, that is what we are going to be.”
God had revealed Himself as a holy God, and of course they could say, “Oh yes, our God is a holy God.” But our God is also a holy teacher, and He does not let us get away with such blissful ignorance.
He starts a training session for these children of Israel to begin to show them what this word holy means. The first thing God does, the way I picture it, is to show them the ground they are standing on.
They are standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, milling around, pitching tents, striking tents, moving from place to place. God is going to show them that they are on holy ground. God says, “I am going to visit My people.”
This is not a normal visitation. When God visits people, there is thunder and lightning and smoke and trembling. The holy God shows up and teaches His children a lesson.
The Lord said to Moses, “Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments.
And let them be ready for the third day, for on the third day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.
You shall set bounds for the people all around, saying, ‘Beware that you do not go up on the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death.’
No hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through; whether beast or man, he shall not live.”
Then, when the ram’s horn sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.
So it came about on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunder and lightning flashes and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet sound, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled.
And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain.
God wants to meet with His children. But before He can meet with His children, they must be cleansed and consecrated. The land on which God will come down must be roped off, set apart.
So Moses gave clear instructions: nobody can go on this mountain. It is now roped off. This is no longer just a mountain; this is where God is going to come down. Sure enough, after three days God came down with thunder, lightning, trumpets, and smoke. This was God’s appearing on a holy mountain consecrated for the Lord.
It was when the boundaries were set around the mountain that, in a sense, this mountain was made holy. It was set aside for the Lord God.
This is one of the first lessons God teaches His children in the Old Testament: the difference between normal ground and His ground. His ground has to be prepared. His ground has to be set aside. Then He can come down and manifest His glory.
We find this principle of differentiation, describing the difference between the holy and the common, throughout the Old Testament and, in fact, the New Testament. Turn for a moment to Leviticus 10.
The Lord then spoke to Aaron, saying, “Do not drink wine or strong drink, neither you nor your sons with you, when you come into the tent of meeting, so that you may not die—it is a perpetual statute throughout your generations—
And so as to make a distinction between the holy and the profane, and between the unclean and the clean,
And so as to teach the sons of Israel all the statutes which the Lord has spoken to them through Moses.”
God uses the priest to make a point to the children of Israel. The point is the difference between the holy and the profane. There is to be a clear line of demarcation between the holy and the profane.
When we use the word profane, we mean something filthy, dirty, and no good. But the actual Hebrew word here simply means anything that is not holy. It is just common. It does not necessarily have to be bad; it is simply common.
God does not come down on that which is common. A distinction must be drawn between the common and the holy. The priests were an example of this because, when they walked into the tent of meeting, they were never supposed to be slightly tipsy from having drunk strong drink. That was a common thing, and the priests were to be holy in all their service to the Lord.
God says, “I want to make a distinction between holy and common.” Whenever God moves, He comes down and possesses something; He makes it holy. Whatever God takes is holy. Whatever belongs to God is holy. It changes the sphere completely, from common to holy.
But before God comes down on something, that thing must be roped off.
Throughout the Old Testament, God was teaching His people this simple principle. God not only roped off this mountain—and, by the way, from that day on it was called the holy mountain—but He used the same procedure with many other dimensions of life that had previously been common.
God not only made a mountain holy; the Bible says God took a day and made it holy. All days are common. We just work every day and think every day is the same. But God took the seventh day.
Genesis 2:3 is the only reference in Genesis where the word holy is used. God did everything in six days, and on the seventh day He rested, blessed that day, and made it holy. Now this day was not to be a common day; it was a holy day.
God made it holy for the people of Israel and said, “Now you do not work on this day because this is My day. You can own six days; I own this day. It is roped off for My purposes and My will.”
Eventually, God roped off a land. He said, “This land, you may think you are walking in common territory, but this is holy land. This is the holy land.” When you enter into this promised land, take off your shoes and realize the place where you are. This is a special place.
When David became king, the first thing he did for God was rope off Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a city like the other cities in Israel—not the greatest city—but it was God’s city. When David roped it off and the tabernacle was brought into the city, it was changed. It became the holy city, the city of God, Jerusalem.
The same thing applies to the tabernacle and the temple. When they set up the tabernacle, put everything in its proper place, and consecrated it all, then God came down and made it the holy tabernacle.
The utensils in the tabernacle had to be set up in just the right way. Then they were consecrated and made holy. They would take sheep and oxen out of their flocks and herds, but when they took a sheep aside for a sacrifice for God, it had to be pure and unblemished.
When it was taken aside, this common animal was no longer common. It was God’s animal. It was a holy sacrifice, totally distinct from the commonness of the rest of the flock.
God began to teach the children about holiness by making this distinction between the common and the holy. These things that God has must be pure and clean. That is why holiness has such overtones of moral perfection, purity, and cleanness.
The third overtone in all these lessons is this: God wants to possess things, and they have to be holy.
Why did He teach these lessons with land and a day and a place and a sacrifice? Because what God really wanted to show the people was who He is and who they are.
“I want you to be a holy nation.” The people did not understand that at first. But as God, the holy teacher, brought them through these lessons and made such painstaking rules, they began to understand.
I suppose all of you wonder, when we read Leviticus, why it is always repeated. It seems so redundant: take this holy thing, sprinkle it with this, do this; then take this holy thing, sprinkle it with this. It goes on and on and on.
It is God’s way of saying, “When you separate something for Me, take painstaking care to do it just right—to clean it, prepare it, rope it off—and then I will come down and accept this sacrifice.”
God is saying, “I want you to learn that there is a great difference, a qualitative difference, between that which is common and that which is holy.”
Now, is that not like our Christian life today? We are the people of God. The Bible says that we are the saints.
From the moment we have taken Christ and He has taken us, He becomes our Lord and we are born again. We become saints, which is simply a way of saying that we become holy ones.
It is incredible to understand the gospel of our salvation: from the moment we receive Jesus as our Lord, we are holy ones. Yet, even though we are already holy ones, are we not sort of like the slaves who came out of Egypt?
We do not really know who God is. We do not really know who we are. We do not even really know what ground we are standing on.
When I was saved, I was so glad to be saved. I did not know if I was in the world or in Christ. I did not know this distinction. I do not know about you. Maybe you had a lot of teaching about the world and Christ.
These are our two realms. In the Old Testament, it was the common and the holy. Now, in our terminology, it has changed to the world or in Christ. But when I was saved, I did not know whether I was in the world or in Christ. I just knew I was saved, and I was glad to be there. I was glad to be forgiven of all my sins.
What a lesson God has to begin to lead us through. I am so glad that many of the New Testament references to holy are talking about the Holy Spirit. Now He has a job. His job is to take us slaves and teach us what holiness really means.
It is not an easy job. We all come from different backgrounds. Especially those of you who grew up here in the good old U.S.A. grew up with different understandings of who God is, what holiness means, and all kinds of things that were wrong. We have to be reeducated.
The first thing the Holy Spirit has to do is show us what it means to say that we have a holy God. It depends on what your background is. We all have caricatures of who we think God really is and what we think holiness really means.
I grew up in what you would call a liberal Protestant doctrine. This gave me the idea that if there was a God, He was the God of love who was always nice to people. This is what I call the doctrine of a sloppy love, as distinct from agape love, the powerful love of God.
God is just kind of loving everybody, holiness is not so important, you can be a little sloppy, you make mistakes, and God overlooks it. After all, God was a liberal Protestant. He was mostly concerned with social issues; all that mystical and religious stuff did not matter much.
That is the kind of context I generally grew up in. Boy, God has had to teach me some lessons about what holiness is all about. I just did not know.
Other people grew up in strong, orthodox, severe religious contexts, where God is pictured as holy, all right, but it is a caricature. It is God the Thor, the god of thunder, always ready to dynamite somebody at the least little provocation.
The idea of God is like the God on the Sistine Chapel, with His cheeks filled with wind, ready to blow you over: a powerful God who is really just about fed up with your life. If you do not toe the line, you are going to get it. You are always on the edge of some gloom-and-doom experience.
Many people grow up with this idea of what the holiness of God is, and that is a caricature. It is no better than sloppy love. It is not true of who God is. God is not looking to blow you away. Just give Him three good excuses, and that is it.
The psalm says that we should worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Is that not amazing—the beauty of holiness?
This is from Psalm 29:2. There is a lot of controversy over what this means. The New American Standard Version says, “Worship the Lord in holy array,” which tends to put the focus on the worshiper.
Although there is a big debate on it, I will tell you what I think. Fools always rush in where angels fear to tread. I believe in the Hebrew it is actually referring to the majesty of God: worship Him, and as you look at His holiness, see the beauty of His holiness.
If you prefer, it can rightly say that when you worship the Lord, you should be adorned in holiness also. But whatever way you look at it, the real focus should be on God, His holiness, and His beauty.
When I became a Christian, I had no concept of the beauty of holiness. As a matter of fact, holiness always slightly turned me off. I was a little afraid of it.
When I saw a Christian—I met one or two—who was truly holy, I thought they were a little weird. They always talked so straight. They were so modest. I was such a braggart, and I liked to tell stories and everything. They seemed like such awkward people.
Well, maybe they were awkward. But what God is raising up is a peculiar people. Now I look at some of the same people I thought were strange, and it fills my heart with wonder. Look at the holiness of God in that thing. It is a marvelous thing: the beauty of holiness.
Holiness used to put a little fear in me because I had so much stuff hiding down in my life. This is always the problem. Whenever the Holy Spirit wanted to show me holiness, it always made me want to run, because I knew if God ever really showed up, I was done for.
But the Holy Spirit began to come into my life, as He comes into all of ours, and He begins to teach us the lessons of holiness.
First, He starts roping off things. Have you noticed that? It is sort of the same old strategy. He starts roping off things. I thank God that the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin and convicts us of worldliness in our lives, and starts roping off that territory.
For young Christians, most of the roping off we feel is that kind of prohibition: “Do not do this. Do not do that.” It is almost as though He lassos us with a rope: “You cannot go there. You cannot go there.” We say, “But why? Why?”
But the real roping that God wants to do is to rope us in to Himself, so that He can come down and possess us with the same jealous possessiveness, the same fire that was experienced at the tabernacle when the Shekinah glory came down.
He wants to possess us, but He has to get us within certain prepared ground so that He can fill us with His presence. Let us look at a few Scriptures that show this wonderful roping off of God.
For both He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one Father; for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren.
He who sanctifies means He who makes holy. Sanctify is simply the Latin word for “make holy.” Here we see the Sanctifier, the Holy One, in union with those being sanctified. That is us.
He calls us brethren, encourages us to enter within the veil, and encourages us to see Him as the great High Priest who forever intercedes for us before the throne of God.
Here we see that God actually does want to rope us in, put the Sanctifier in our midst, call us brethren, fellowship with us, and exhort us within these bounds.
Of course, the boundary now of a Christian, in practice, is in Christ. He has become our sanctification. As 1 Corinthians 1:30 says, He is our sanctification.
In Christ, we find a whole new ground. It takes a while, I suppose, for us Christians to realize that we are actually standing on brand-new ground. You may still live in Philadelphia, Virginia, or New York, yet through Christ you are standing on completely new ground.
It is not common at all. It is totally of a different quality. It is holy ground in Christ. By the Holy Spirit, by many infallible proofs, He shows us time and time again: “This is the real ground you stand on. Take off your shoes. You are in Christ, and you are a new creation.”
The Lord not only ropes off boundaries of things we cannot do and ropes us into boundaries of fellowship with Himself; He does set aside things, like a day.
We still have a sense as young Christians that our days are just the same as they always were, until the Lord ropes some off and says, “Now wait a minute. This is My day.”
Sometimes, for a person, that means not doing anything on Sunday. But as we grow in Christ, we see that the Lord is after something so qualitatively different. It is not just an external day He wants.
“If because of the Sabbath, you turn your foot
From doing your own pleasure on My holy day,
And call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable,
And shall honor it, desisting from your own ways,
From seeking your own pleasure and speaking your own word,
Then you will take delight in the Lord,
And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;
And I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father,
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
What does the Lord want—one day a week? No. Every day. Does He just want us not to do bad things on the Sabbath? Does He just want us not to work one day a week?
What He really says in these verses is that if we turn from satisfying ourselves and concentrate on satisfying Him, we will end up riding on high and being satisfied more than we have ever been before.
The question is: what is today? What is this week? Is this a week to satisfy our own pleasure, a week for us to rest? Surely these things are included. But is this not a week to seek the things of God, to find His pleasure?
God has set this aside like the feasts of old, when He says, “This is My day. This is a holy day. Weep not, mourn not, rejoice. This is a holy day. Drink of the sweet, eat of the fat, and rejoice. This is a holy day unto God.”
God has to take our days, separate them, rope them off, and come down and say, “Now this is My day, no longer your day.” Wonderful.
The Lord also sets aside a place in our life. I do not know about you, but I found when I was a young Christian—I say that like I am a real old one now; I have been a Christian nineteen years—that I had to have a quiet time.
God had set aside a place where you and I could be alone. You read the Bible, you pray, you get your orientation, you get your sense of who the Lord is, and then you go out.
Every one of us should do this. We should begin our day with a sense of coming to the Lord, finding our orders, getting our commands from the King, getting our priorities lined up, and getting our minds set on Him.
God wants to set aside a place in our life. But as we go on, we see that the Lord does not just want a quiet time at seven o’clock in the morning, and then from seven-fifteen until midnight we live by the seat of our pants and try to do the best we can by our own wit, skill, wisdom, and strength.
As we go on in the Lord, we find that He continually brings us into little roped-off areas where He says, “Come to Me. Turn to Me.” Just like Moses walking in the wilderness, unaware that he had already walked into a restricted zone, and God showed up and said, “Wait a minute. Here I am.”
Joshua, looking over Jericho, suddenly had gone into this fenced-off area. This is God. It is time to do business with Him. Here we are doing business all day long, taking care of kids, and sometimes never aware that God ropes off these times and places and says, “Now this is My time. This is My time.”
God, by His Spirit, teaches us the lessons of holiness and shows us these things. He takes the day, takes a place, takes a mountain, and makes our lives holy.
With all these things, we sense the faithfulness of God, who keeps His holy arm with us all the time. Now, this can be discouraging at times because His holy arm is always there. He is always there to convict us, and if we do not do something about it, we feel miserable.
He always sets up circumstances in our lives, and it is never the way we thought it should be done. He always does things differently. He always takes a little longer. He always works a harder route for us to get to the goals that He has set for us. Does it not always seem that way?
Yet it is always His holy arm. Whenever we look back, we say, “Oh, His great holy arm got the victory. Isn’t God wonderful?” As we look forward, we say, “Uh-oh, here is His holy arm.”
Until, I suppose, God gets us to the place where we are broken before His majesty, we worship the beauty of holiness, even of His holy arm that faithfully goes with us, relentlessly deals with us, disciplines us, lifts us up, delivers us, and saves us in a way that no human being and no other god can ever do.
He does things in a perfect way. It is just a lot different from the way we want to have it done, until it is done the right way, all the loose ends tied up, everything done perfectly as only God can do.
He leads us by His Holy Spirit, separating things in our lives. He moves by His holy arm, working on us, working on us. Why does He do this? Let us turn to Hebrews 12.
Our fathers disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.
He wants to fully possess us. He wants to stamp upon our lives: “A holy people. A holy nation.” Christians are holy not only by calling, not only by position, but holy in experience because we are alive to a holy God who is imparting His divine nature to us.
It is a wonderful thing when you see a Christian who has been sort of loafing along suddenly catch a vision that God really wants him to be a holy person.
Rather than being defeated about it or feeling like he can never make it—of course, that is usually our response: “I will never be a holy person. I know all my Christian friends might be able to, but I could never be”—the holy arm of God begins to take him through things.
Then he sees that God is faithful, that He can do it, and that His life in him is sanctifying him. When a person sees this vision—that it is not just the place and time that God wants holy, but God wants you and me to be holy—it transforms us.
We no longer want to be like the world. When we see what true beauty of holiness really is, we want to be like God in all the beauty of His holiness.
Now, just a few final Scriptures of exhortation. What should we do? Here we are at this conference. We know there is a holy God, and we know there is some divine dealing that He wants to do with us this week. How do we respond?
We are so curious. We want to see God this week. But we are so afraid that if we keep on going, we will move back one row every night until, by Saturday, we are on the last row. How do we deal with this feeling? We want more of God, yet we are hesitant.
The Bible has just a few things to say. Consider again Isaiah 57:15, the wonderful, ultimate contrast that cannot be understood by anybody except one of His own.
Thus says the high and exalted One
Who lives forever, whose very name is Holy,
“I dwell on a high and holy place,
And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit,
In order to revive the spirit of the lowly
And to revive the heart of the contrite.”
When we come into the presence of a holy God and begin to feel this mysterium tremendum, this holy fear, the best thing for us to do is humble ourselves before the majesty of this God who fills the temple.
What does He do? He revives our spirit, revives our heart, and imparts His holiness to us. God, in all of this otherness and all of this inability to define Him, the person of the Holy One—the One whose name is Holy—wants to come to the contrite and humble.
If that is you, then you are starting off in the right place. The problem with the children of Israel was that they began to be smug in their holiness. They changed the definition of holiness from the holiness of God to their own relative holiness: “I am holier than the Philistines.”
This was the beginning of the end for them. Pride replaced the humility of a true vision of God’s holiness. Although you may be relatively more holy than a lot of people you know, when God shows up, there is nobody here who can stand.
If we know that He is here among us, let us just be contrite in His presence for this weekend and see what God can do in our lives. If you are here and you are a young Christian, and you think all these things are too deep, too impossible, too hard, and that you could never be this kind of person, just humble yourself before God’s presence.
You will sense Him reviving you, breathing life into you, to be the holy person He has called you to be. This is the first simple thing.
The second is in 1 Peter 3. I will just read 1 Peter 3:15.
But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence.
Sanctify Christ as Lord in your heart. Sanctify means to rope off your heart and say, “This is our Lord’s property.”
Take your heart. Where is your heart right now? Is your heart flying back home with some boyfriend hundreds of miles away? Is your heart thinking about your job that you have to return to in not too many days? Is your heart flying in some other direction—some family problem or financial matter?
Then let us today, in the recognition that there is a holy God who wants to come down if we will prepare ground, set the ground of our heart apart for Him alone.
Sanctify Christ as Lord of our hearts. We will not have another. We want Him to be the Lord this week and in our hearts. This is valuable territory—your heart. Will you sanctify it? Will you make it holy?
Will you set it aside and say, “Christ, I want You as Lord of my heart right now”? This is preparation for His coming down—taking the shoes off your feet, as it were, and saying, “Christ, be Lord of my life and my heart.”
Romans 6:19:
I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.
We want this result of holiness in our lives. What should we do? Not only sanctify our hearts and sanctify Christ as Lord of our hearts, but present ourselves as slaves of righteousness.
Have you ever done that in life? You say, “Oh, this is impossible. I could never be righteous.” But forget that. By faith, present yourself to God as a living sacrifice. Having been redeemed by the precious blood of the Lamb, present yourself as a slave to righteousness.
No longer a slave to impurity, no longer a slave to the world, no longer a slave to your own desires: “I am a slave to righteousness.” Do you know what this does? That results in sanctification.
This is not a halfhearted commitment. This is not, “Well, maybe I will rope off my life.” This is not only roping off your life; this is opening up your life and saying, “I want to be a slave to God and His righteousness.”
The sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit will work in you with extreme power because He is pleased with such humility and such a contrite heart.
Two more Scriptures. First Timothy 2, verse 8:
Therefore I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and dissension.
Here again, we have this privilege before our Lord God of praying to Him, praying and really seeking Him, lifting up holy hands—hands cleansed by the precious blood, hands being sanctified by the work of the Spirit.
Pray this week. Pray that God would do a work of sanctification, come down, and possess His holy possession—His people, as we are.
Then one last verse: Psalm 29, verses 1 and 2.
Ascribe to the Lord, O sons of the mighty,
Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name;
Worship the Lord in the beauty of His holiness.
I do not know how much we know of God. There is an eternity to go, and there is much to learn. But I am convinced that the more we see of Him, the more we will see His beauty in holiness and in love.
Maybe you are a young Christian. You do not know God very well. You have caricatures in your mind of what God’s holiness is like or what God’s love is like. If you will open your heart and your mind this week, perhaps we will see a God who is high and lifted up and holy as we have never seen Him before.
Perhaps you have been a Christian for a long time and have known the Lord so long that there is almost a sense of familiarity. I am sure Isaiah had known the Lord in his own way for a number of years.
May it be that, as we are gathered together for this week, we will sense the presence of God coming down and filling this place like smoke in the temple; that we would see Him enthroned and high and lifted up.
May we see those seraphim circling around, with their faces covered, their feet covered, and flying with their wings, crying, “Holy, holy, holy.” Will we join in and sing that song too?
Will we break through the barriers of fear and our own sense of unworthiness, and in true humility bow before the Lord, even with that sense of, “Woe is me, for I am unclean”? Let the Lord come and sanctify us and touch our lips with His coal of sanctification.
We have a wonderful opportunity this week. I do believe that God, by His faithfulness, is roping off the area. He is saying, “Saints, prepare your hearts. I am coming down.” May we find this to be the case this very day.
Lord, we do just say that we have understood just a little bit of that which cannot be understood: that You are a holy God, and You want us to be a holy people.
We cannot understand nor define these terms except as You reveal Yourself to us, that we could see how far Your ways are above our ways and Your thoughts are above our thoughts; that we could have a whole new understanding of what life is, what our days are, and what ground we are standing on.
Oh Lord, this is something that takes a breakthrough of Your Holy Spirit in our lives. Do not let us—Lord, please do not let us—wallow around where we are right now. Lift us higher. Make us a holy nation, and begin to function in that priesthood You have given to us.
Enable our brothers Ernie, Stephen, and Johannes, as they share, to open our eyes to the wonder of You and the wonder of our calling. We want to say, along with Isaiah years ago, “I see the Lord.”
I see the Lord.
I see the Lord.
He is high and lifted up,
And His train fills the temple.
He is high and lifted up,
And His train fills the temple.
The angels cry, “Holy.”
The angels cry, “Holy.”
The angels cry, “Holy.”